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Syncrude also has its own upgrader and uses the heat from the upgrader process to heat water for extraction and also to heat its administrative headquarters.

Perhaps the most eloquent spokesman of the “continuous improvement” movement in the oilsands is Steve Laut, executive vice-chairman of Canadian Natural Resources. Laut recently made his case on the excellent ARC Energy podcast with oil and gas experts Peter Tertzakian and Jackie Forrest.

Laut argued that oilsands are no longer high-cost or high-carbon, and noted that CNRL wants to take another huge step, one day reaching the goal of net zero emissions on CNRL’s upstream production.

Oilsands takes a huge amount of investment, but once an operation is up and running, it has 50 to 60 years of steady supply, and all those decades to refine its processes. Since 2009, Laut said per-barrel costs of production at CNRL have dropped, from $42-$44 US per barrel to $15 US. He’d like to get that number to $10 per barrel.

The average greenhouse gas emissions per barrel are now close to the average emissions of crude oil consumed in the U.S.A., Laut said.

“To me this a really true Canadian success story and people don’t really realize it.”

The future gains will come in technologies like carbon capture and storage, and converting carbon into useable products, Laut said.

So Alberta has a sound and reasonable answer to the “dirty oil” allegation and to the destructive, misguided and out-of-date smear campaign pushed by many green activists and the likes of Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet.

We already have a Rhino Party but perhaps Blanchet, the Green’s Elizabeth May and the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh should start their own goofball Dinosaur Party for folks who babble on about “dirty oil” based on yesterday’s news and yesterday’s technology, processes and economics. They hate Canada’s fossil fuel industry but their contempt is based on their own fossilized thinking.

As for Alberta and Canada, the future of our oilsands is to be a clean, lean oil-producing machine.