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Champion
 
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The only reason that tar sands extraction is viable, as I said, is because gas is relatively cheap and oil is expensive. Either way tar sands are not a realistic alternative to pumped oil.
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PD - Machupa Kivull - Sandy coloured great-coated Gnoll
Shards/Ascendancy - Crew
FOIP is short for 'torture me for more info'
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Wag
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Shven (5/13/2008)
The only reason that tar sands extraction is viable, as I said, is because gas is relatively cheap and oil is expensive. Either way tar sands are not a realistic alternative to pumped oil.
I'm afraid I'd find links to evidence to support the claim more realistic than restatement in emphatic tones. Since I wasn't convinced the first time, then I'm unlikely to be convinced by the claim when you repeat it, unless you add additional evidence or explain the reasoning further.
It is fair to say that tar sands extraction is only viable because oil is expensive, that much is definitely true. But this is true of extraction of any commodity from any location by any method. If the price of oil dropped to $10 a barrel than a significant amount of the oil extracted currently would have to be abandoned because it would cease to be viable. If it rises to a billion dollars a barrel then we'll be able to mine it on venus and ship it back. As the price rises, more difficult to reach deposits become financially viable (a process also driven by improving technology). It is for this reason that current oil deposits are larger today than at any time previously. (That's a pretty terrible link, but the best I could find at short notice).
Pretty much everyone agrees that oil has to be historically very expensive to make the effort to extract tar sands oil financially viable. I believe they usually quote figures of around $25 to $50 a barrel. Obviously oil is currently at $120 plus a barrel and they're now talking about it going to $200 a barrel. As a result there is now massive investment into tar sands extraction (although still dwarfed by the scale of regular oil pumping).
There are voices for and against on the issue, extremists on both sides, and data is very hard to come by. In the end I choose to look where the money is going and in this case the money is going into extracting oil from tar sands. I'm afraid I find that more convincing than your assertion that it isn't profitable and won't work.
History is an important source for LRP. Along with other works of fiction.
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Wag
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Matt Pennington (5/13/2008)
As the price rises, more difficult to reach deposits become financially viable (a process also driven by improving technology).
It's worth noting that the "cost" of extraction isn't necessarily constant - it's the nuclear reactor issue. Very cheap, stable supply of electricity - unfortunately you have to pay 2/3 of the entire cost of 60+ years of electricity in the 5 years before it goes online. If you were offered an interest free loan, an assured minimum price, a one-shot yes/no planning process and a promise that the government wouldn't decide to illegalise you after 20 years you could average that out but in practice the risks involve turn it into a massive upfront investment with very long term profits which the government could very easily take away from you.
I guess the other case in point is the Wankel engine (beloved of people who like to see the word Wank written on the side of the Encyclopedia Britannica). From my limited grasp of engineering thermodynamics, the design technically has a significantly higher maximum efficiency (as well as a number of other significant advantages like less moving parts). However the piston engine has had 100 years of research and development - it seems fairly likely that 100 years of research and development into improving Wankel engines would lead to something significantly superior - but it's hard to see when it's going to be worth someone's while to do that. I always find it ironic when people claim that human culture is totally distinct from genetics because it can leap out of local minima.
Marios
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Initiate
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| What I find hilariouse about the energy crises is that there a scottish compnay creating a very effective means of creating energy from the tides. Britian is surrounded by this energy, if we harnessed it we wouldn't need wind, nuclear or gas to power our economy but the only country currently using it is portugal. Good one British planners and politicians.
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Heroic Knight
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I feel some people may be missing the point of this thread...
-- -- -- Eos: Manius Shard, Shard tank commander FnH: Officious Guard no.1
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Wag
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Orcboy (5/13/2008)
What I find hilariouse about the energy crises is that there a scottish compnay creating a very effective means of creating energy from the tides.
It's like gathering wild nuts - if you can do it without damaging the environment, why not? - but it's a bit ridiculous to suggest that we don't need farms anymore because we can gather 1,000 times the nuts. Even if there were that many nuts and it didn't cost more to plant extra nut trees where they don't already exist than to farm you'd still be mad to rely entirely on a single fluctuating source.
Orcboy (5/13/2008)
Britian is surrounded by this energy, if we harnessed it we wouldn't need wind, nuclear or gas to power our economy but the only country currently using it is portugal. Good one British planners and politicians.
People have been considering these things for quite a while -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severn_Barrage
- but it's hard to remove energy from the environment without disrupting the ecologies that were previously using that energy (you need to look around for sources which aren't being exploited or ecologies you don't give a shit about disrupting). Nuclear and fossil fuels have the big environmental plus that no ecosystems (bar some very, very obscure bacteria) subsist by extracting energy from them.
Marios
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Prodigal
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Shven (5/12/2008)
Incidentally I wasn't aware of the existence of mass produced LRP weapons. Latex will be more expensive certainly, but we had rubber products in the UK in Victorian times, and if our technology levels go back to the pre-victorian then I think LRP will be the least of our worries.Afraid so. As to the least of our worries- I'm pretty sure I said exactly the same thing at the beginning of the thread (when I was told this was a "light hearted" thread). Oil companies will explore any means to extract oil, it doesn't mean they're running out, it means they want you to stop criticising them for carrying out messy geological surveys in wilderness areas, because you think they're running out. (or at least that's what Greenpeace told me)
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Champion
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I'm afraid that the information I have on Tar Sands is in paper form and so isn't something I can easily refer you to (in case you're interested, the information is from the Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins) - and I've not been able to find a good online source of data for it. The reason I am saying that tar sands are not a viable replacement for more conventional methods is the speed at which they can be extracted. The issue of peak oil is not one of how much oil is left, but of how much oil we can produce. As production decreases and demand increases we can expect prices to continue to rise until alot of things that we take for granted could potentially be no longer economically viable.
A breakdown of each countries oil production and when a peak in their production happened or is predicted to happen is available at http://www.lastoilshock.com/map.html - from this you will notice that the only countries not expected to hit the peak of their production within the next fifteen years are in fact Canada and Venezuela - both with peak production rates of around 6 and 3.75 million barrels per day - a far cry from the 78 million barrels a day produced in 2005.
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PD - Machupa Kivull - Sandy coloured great-coated Gnoll
Shards/Ascendancy - Crew
FOIP is short for 'torture me for more info'
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