Alarming Canadian Oil Sands Facts:

It takes 1 barrell of Oil and 4 barrells of Water to produce 6 barrells of Oil.
2.2 tons of earth is extracted for 1 of these barrells of Oil.
Production will rises to 3.4 million barrells of Oil a day by 2015.

www.cnn.com...

Wow...

I don't want to be "complaining" because I live in Alberta and work in Calgary, which bases most all Oil Company HQ's in Canada, for one of the largest oil companies in the world...

However, there MUST be a "better" way to extract the oil from the dirt and get at the bitumen.

reply to post by CanadianDream420


Umm those figures are for pit mining not drill production. Also they recycle most of the water.

www.capp.ca...

It's also funny because CNN got busted for modifying the color of the water in a tailings pond so it appears black and menacing when the actual pond was crystal clear, they waited till the sun was in a specific location so it would appear dark because of the reflections.

reply to post by CanadianDream420


Liquid Salt Could Clean Up Canadian Tar Sand

A new technique being pioneered at Penn State University may serve to dramatically reduce the environmental impact of the oil extraction processes being used in Alberta. Currently, separating the “usable” oil from the tar sands involves mixing them with warm water, then agitating the mixture until it separates. This process requires literally tons of water, however, which is diverted from nearby rivers before being pumped into open-air “tailings ponds”, where the toxic sludge can leach its way back into the water table.

Instead of using warm water from diverted rivers and streams, the new method would make use of room temperature ionic liquids (ILs), which consist of salt in a liquid state. When these ILs are introduced to a tar sand mixture and agitated, the resulting combination settles into three distinct layers (below).

As you can see, the process leaves a top layer of bitumen (tar) can be easily removed and refined.

Once the process is complete and the tar is removed, the the ILs – unlike the water being used currently – can be reused, while the now tar-free sands can be returned to the environment. The good news doesn’t end there, though: because the process can make use of ILs at much lower temperatures, there are significant energy savings that come from not heating thousands of tons of water

www.matternetwork.com...

Originally posted by CanadianDream420

...However, there MUST be a "better" way to extract the oil from the dirt and get at the bitumen....

The energy cartel constrains the definition of "better" to mean "cheaper." Is that our definition too?

Coming from a country knee-deep in fractioning for natural gas, I can tell you, it seems the "best" way translating to the "cheapest" way never seems to work out very well for the community of consumers.

Originally posted by SirMike
reply to post by CanadianDream420

 

Liquid Salt Could Clean Up Canadian Tar Sand

A new technique being pioneered at Penn State University may serve to dramatically reduce the environmental impact of the oil extraction processes being used in Alberta. Currently, separating the “usable” oil from the tar sands involves mixing them with warm water, then agitating the mixture until it separates. This process requires literally tons of water, however, which is diverted from nearby rivers before being pumped into open-air “tailings ponds”, where the toxic sludge can leach its way back into the water table.

Instead of using warm water from diverted rivers and streams, the new method would make use of room temperature ionic liquids (ILs), which consist of salt in a liquid state. When these ILs are introduced to a tar sand mixture and agitated, the resulting combination settles into three distinct layers (below).

As you can see, the process leaves a top layer of bitumen (tar) can be easily removed and refined.

Once the process is complete and the tar is removed, the the ILs – unlike the water being used currently – can be reused, while the now tar-free sands can be returned to the environment. The good news doesn’t end there, though: because the process can make use of ILs at much lower temperatures, there are significant energy savings that come from not heating thousands of tons of water

www.matternetwork.com...

Great info many thx so does this mean i should take ya off me rivals list good thing i just found a new one lol
sad thing about these new methods is they can take forever to get put through unless there is a big public outcry for it...

Originally posted by UcDat
Great info many thx so does this mean i should take ya off me rivals list good thing i just found a new one lol
sad thing about these new methods is they can take forever to get put through unless there is a big public outcry for it...

Na, you can keep me on, I dont have many rivals.

Its been my experience that not all technological breakthroughs are as marketable as they first appear. Some just suffer from marketing failures, other don’t quite scale to industrial applications properly and the rest cost far more to implement than they would save the end user.

On this one, I guess it’s a wait and see.

Originally posted by SirMike

Na, you can keep me on, I dont have many rivals.

fine but you better start shilling or else

this is pretty cool news all around being Alberten myself I gotta say keep the Canadian news flowing.

Originally posted by UcDat

Originally posted by SirMike

Na, you can keep me on, I dont have many rivals.

fine but you better start shilling or else

this is pretty cool news all around being Alberten myself I gotta say keep the Canadian news flowing.

I spent 3 months in a little town called "Grande Cache" ... lovely view but terrible nite life.

reply to post by CanadianDream420


The scary part is they are doing this in the Arctic Ocean, 2seasons ago on ice road truckers, they were delivering supplies, 70 miles out, for the purpose of drilling for gas down in the sands.