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Progress and Problems

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By far the greatest emission of greenhouse gases, however, comes not from producing oil, but from using it. For every ounce of carbon dioxide emitted in producing a barrel of oil from the oil sands and refining it into finished products, four or five times as much is emitted when cars and trucks burn it as gasoline or diesel fuel or in other uses.

  • Land disturbance. About two tons of sand are left to be disposed of for every barrel of oil produced in mining the Athabasca deposit. Close to four million tons of sand will have to be returned to mined-out areas each day by early in the century's second decade. By returning previously removed muskeg and topsoil together with replanting trees and shrubs and by other measures, oil sands miners have begun to restore mined-out areas to their original state of biological productivity, but it is not a small task. Water and clay from the water separation plants dumped into tailing ponds also have a potential impact on water quality that "does not lend itself to . . . easy solutions," according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.40
  • Water consumption. About 80 percent of the water used for steam in in situ production is recycled, and most of the remaining 20 percent is absorbed by the underground sand. The net result is that about one bar­rel of water is consumed or lost underground for every barrel of in situ oil production and upgrading. Thus by early in the next decade, water con­sumption for SAGD in situ production is likely to exceed 200,000 barrels a day, with the possibility of increasing volumes thereafter.

Cost, rather than technology, is likely to be the only constraint on the ability to meet these and other challenges confronting oil sands development. Innovators are gambling hundreds of millions of dollars that research and development will yield commercially economic solutions. Every obstacle that had earlier faced oil sands developers was slowly overcome during the past century, step by step. There is no reason to believe that current challenges will not similarly be met. The major difference now is that with advanced technology such as computer-simulated models, the answers to technical problems come much, much faster.

Two pilot in situ projects launched in late 2003 and in 2004, each costing a projected $30 million could by themselves, if successful, over­come many of these challenges. One involves the use of solvents to extract the bitumen, the other uses fire flooding. Both are based on the hope that horizontal drilling will do for these methods what it did so spectacularly for the use of steam to extract the bitumen underground.

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