

Oil Sands Mining Uses Up Almost as Much Energy as It Produces - mactitan
http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20130219/oil-sands-mining-tar-sands-alberta-canada-energy-return-on-investment-eroi-natural-gas-in-situ-dilbit-bitumen

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fjorder
That article is not good. Biased reporting based on a biased study. Yes, all
writing is biased, but sometimes evidence suggests it's worse than usual, and
this is one of those cases. From the cradle of the study to the grave of your
mind, everything in the chain producing this article has a clear bias.

Study: Published by the "Post Carbon Institute". They're not even trying.

Article: Written by an author whose only credentials are a pretty face and a
B.Sc. in biology. Can she spot bad stats? Probably not. Is she likely to take
any damning claim about the oil sands the study makes at face value without a
second thought? Yes.

Publisher: insideclimatenews.org. They're a little more cagey about revealing
their biases than the Post Carbon Institute, which is to say they're still
about as subtle as a club to the head.

Now, don't get me wrong. I live close to the oil sands and will pay a greater
price than most reading this for that oil. I am not in the O&G industry, but I
have deep concerns about how the oilsands are being extracted. Specifically,
groundwater seepage from tailings ponds is probably one of the nastiest local
consequences. Perhaps even more concerning is that accountability is going
down as foreign ownership climbs. Just as no Hollywood blockbuster makes money
on paper these days, my concern is that once the oilsands are no longer
commercially viable, parent companies will quietly abscond with the profits
while the oilsands companies go bankrupt and fail to follow through on the
long-term cleanup that will be necessary.

However, all this is no excuse for giving a pass to blatantly biased articles.
When we give attention to articles such as this it detracts attention from
well-researched independent studies reported on by people who actually have
the chops to spot bad stats and tease apart biased studies. It makes those who
are against oilsands development look like a bunch of clueless tree-hugging
hippies!

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mactitan
Always good to be skeptical. what caught my eye is the EROI ratios which are
in the ballpark. As pointed out below living with 3:1 ratio as compared to
15-20 : 1 is something people will feel. And this could be a trend since OPEC
net exports are dropping due to more internal use of their own oil.

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wtvanhest
"Hall, who wasn't involved in Hughes' study, thinks the EROI for oil sands
would fall closer to 1:1 if the tar sands' full life cycle—including
transportation, refinement into higher quality products, end use efficiency
and environmental costs—was taken into account."

If his statement is true and it costs the same amount of fuel it produces, the
overall cost would exceed the revenue on a variable basis and it would not be
profitable to mine oil at any price.

The exception to this would be if NG is so abundant that we are burning it
since it can't be sold (happens in ND), then using it to refine oil makes
sense.

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teilo
One does not have to resort to theoretical environmental cost calculations to
conclude that ethanol uses up more energy than it produces. Yet I do not see
insideclimatenews.org complaining about the sheer bulk of fossil fuels it
takes to produce ethanol.

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adamjernst
A ratio of 3:1 doesn't strike me as "almost as much energy as it produces."
Would you say that if I gave you $3 for every $1 you gave me?

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icegreentea
Well, the almost figure comes from a secondary analysis that includes
additional energy costs,

"Hall, who wasn't involved in Hughes' study, thinks the EROI for oil sands
would fall closer to 1:1 if the tar sands' full life cycle—including
transportation, refinement into higher quality products, end use efficiency
and environmental costs—was taken into account."

Furthermore, if you structured your whole life around a 15:1 ratio, then a 3:1
ratio could very well be effectively 1:1.

~~~
mactitan
Good point. Just the fact that tar sands is ramping up is a bad sign. We will
feel pain because we're used to cheap energy.

