Canada new OIL capital

www.cbsnews.com...

Looks like there is enough oil to last a few hundred more years.

There is enough oil in the sands to last approximately a century (Not sure if that estimate takes into account an increasingly oil-driven China/India). The only reason we are driven to this oil sand, though, is that all the other oil is gone. Resource gathering picks out the easiest bits first, and then is slowly forced to get at the less economic options.
This is oil, and sweet light crude. But it comes at a premium.

Creating energy from oil sands requires so much energy that the oil companies wind up spiking greenhouse gas emissions.

"And they do it in volumes that exceed any other production of oil crude anywhere on the planet," says Elizabeth May, the director of the Sierra Club of Canada.

Allegedy,, refining four barrels requires a fifth in waste

She takes issue not only with what the oil sands are doing to the atmosphere, but to the land. The oil companies, environmentalists say, are digging up an entire province. Take a helicopter ride over the mines and you’ll think you’re flying over the moon after a moonquake.

I would hate to see Alberta resemble the rutted hill tops and stripped surface mines of America.
Envriomental laws are stringent, and the article goes on to say that backfilling and replanting is
required for these operations. One company went so far as to reintroduce Bison to an area backfilled.

Does Pickens think the days of cheap oil are gone?

"They’re gone," he says. "From what we knew as cheap oil, when I pumped gasoline in Ray Smith’s Sinclair station on Hinkley Street in Holdenvale, Oklahoma, 11 cents a gallon, that’s gone."

Will we ever again see $1.50 a gallon? "We won’t ever see $1.50 a gallon. No, that’s gone," says Pickens.

I worry that the exploitation of these oil sands will be another setback for alternative energy.
However, this will still be expensive oil. There is the possibility that Alternate energies will gain a niche market and work to become less expensive than this sand oil. If anything, I am glad that this will keep us going for a little while longer.
I also think it will be a setback for "Peak Oil is a hoax"ers. If there is relatively cheap oil to be found in vast abundances, why are going after this incredibly expensive and harmful operation to quench our thirst? Even if petroleum is organic, this is all we will have for a long time. The earth operates in thousands of years, not decades.

he bonus for Canadians, aside from the treasure, is the notion that Americans might have to start treating them with a little less condescension.

The worst cost of them all.....

This is new how?

There is enough oil in the sands to last approximately a century (Not sure if that estimate takes into account an increasingly oil-driven China/India).

I don't think it takes those two countries into account. Also it's important to note the peak production expected from the Oil sands will probably never reach 3 mm barrels per day. Did you know they actually plan to build a Nuke plant just to reduce the pollutants spewed into the air in the refining process?

1/3rd of all the oil in the ground in Alberta belongs to China.

Thankfully for Canada, America's option of military takeover of Canadian oil supplies is now effecitively out of the question.

Thankfully for the worlds sake China owns lots of oil in Venezuala and Iran aswell. America has been outsmarted and the third world war hasn't even begun yet.

Jin, what do you mean by that? China can no more own the Albertan sands than the US can own the reserves in Saudi Arabia. Are you saying that the chinese nationalized oil companies are investing in land there?
The US would never invade Canada. To do so would draw condemnation by the entire world, and even if it were in the question than the fact that there are chinese oil companies on the fields would not make much difference to us. As for being outsmarted, it's not as if these reserves have just recently been discovered. They've been known about for a very long time, but it has never been economic to extract them. Likely the US will be able to offer a better price for the oil because it would not have to be shipped transcontinentaly.
I'm just trying to figure out your logic behind this and, quite frankly, am too lazy to do a google on it.

China doesn't own any Oil Sands, but a good portion is going to them. 1/3rd sounds about right as well, India is getting quite a bit as well.

Why is this thread getting more importance than my thread?

This thread lacks published journal on the matter of Canadian Oil Reserves, it just has an article which SAYS that there is 1.5 trillion barrels.

I have a published scientific paper that says that about the US Oil Shales...why can no one provide such evidence for alberta?

Google it and post it then. I frankely think the 1.5 Trillion is grossly exagerated as well but I don't have the energy to go look for it now. I would really like to read any peer-reviewed report as its a bit of a hobby for me to try and figure out all the scientese

Originally posted by jinsanity
1/3rd of all the oil in the ground in Alberta belongs to China.

Thankfully for Canada, America's option of military takeover of Canadian oil supplies is now effecitively out of the question.

Thankfully for the worlds sake China owns lots of oil in Venezuala and Iran aswell. America has been outsmarted and the third world war hasn't even begun yet.

Wow, that is a profoundly uninformed statement.

Oil is fungible. Any oil China gets from Canada is oil they don’t buy from the ME. Any oil produced above the margin lowers the price. It doesn’t matter who makes it, who sells it, or who uses it.