I know about the environmental issues surrounding tar sands of course, but the rampant destruction producing crude from tar sands entails never ceases to blow me away.. I had little clue about the complete energy inefficiency of the process. If we include shale and oil/tar sands in our peak oil calculations, the notion that we’ve hit 50% of reserves becomes moot…… we’ve more likely hit something like 2.5% capacity. If we assume sweet crude ERoEI to be ~20, then tar sands is 3 at best…… The process for refining tar sands goes something like the following…:

Dig a pit around 100m deep, and you’ll hit tar sands, or as the Canadians like to call it, oil sands. Mix with water and separate the oil. There’s a lot of Sulfur in tar sands, and we don’t like Sulfur. So we take CH4, strip the carbon off, and bubble the hydrogen through the tar sand slop. This will form H2S. Precipitate the elemental sulfur in an ice bath, release the hydrogen into the atmosphere, waste natural gas and throw the Hydrogen away, and you get all of this goodness…….:

No, I’m not kidding you, those huge yellow blocks are made of pretty well pure Sulfur…… and those dotty things, they’re cars and trucks….. Apparently there’s a glut of Sulfur in the market, so that it just sits there in all its inimitable yellowness, unwanted…….. Piles upon growing piles of Sulfur cakes.

The above process is of course over-simplified, but that doesn’t alter the fact that its completely insane. The size of the Athabascan tar sands hellhole is equivalent to Saudi Arabia’s oil field before it was pilfered. The government of Alberta thinks it can push production beyond 3 million barrels per day. Hard to imagine a world in which we’re not reliant on oil when we keep finding ever more idiotic ways to extract it. Oh except that stuff by now must surely be making an energy loss…….