Tar Sands

Peak Oil Not a Problem According to NY Times; Scientific American – Our Response on the Financial Aspects

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Recently, we have had two new articles aiming to put to rest people’s fears about peak oil. One is from the New York Times: Oil Industry Sets a Brisk Pace of New Discoveries It talks about the many discoveries this year, and how, if they continue at the pace they have in the first half, they will be the best since 2000. The other is from the October Scientific American, called Squeezing More Oil from the Ground…Its premise seems to be that there are a lot of promising areas that we have not yet explored. When you put this together with advances in drilling and the promises of secondary and tertiary recovery, there is a good chance that oil production will not peak for many years.

Environmental Impacts of Oil Sands Development in Alberta

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The oil sands are an issue of global importance. As conventional sources of crude oil are depleted, unconventional sources of oil, such as the bitumen found in oil sands, play a larger role in offsetting declining conventional production. The Canadian oil sands are the second largest proven oil reserve after Saudi Arabia.

Review: Blackout by Richard Heinberg

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Richard Heinberg’s new book Blackout tries to demolish current assumptions about the world’s remaining coal endowment: namely, that it is immense beyond belief, barely tapped and will last for centuries to come. Heinberg argues that these assumptions are off-base, misleading and not at all supported by recent studies that suggest global coal production could peak in less than two decades.

Review: Tar Sands by Andrew Nikiforuk

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If you’ve been following energy news with a discerning eye, then you already know better than to buy into all the hype about the Canadian tar sands…Far from being a panacea for declining supplies of conventional oil, the sands could…leave Alberta resembling “a third-rate golf course in the Sudan”…The quote comes from Andrew Nikiforuk’s new book Tar Sands, a powerful, eloquent litany of horrors associated with North America’s frenzied dash toward tar sands bitumen.