“Blitz” lines are a sign of the times. These ‘lines’ are designed to evince rampaging greed. How many other ploys can you think of that surreptitiously exploit human avarice?

Here and now we behold the chimera, the “paint horse and its pin-striped-suited rider, named GREED” being followed closely by a pale horse ridden by Death.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176

* geoengineering the atmosphere by seeding it with sulphate crystals to reflect sunlight

He was quoted at the conference as saying:

* “we have enough coal and gas to double our current burn rate for centuries but of course if we did that without CCS we’d ruin the climate.”

That’s the mindset of many, many folks out there right now. We have virtually unlimited fossil fuels and can continue to burn them if we just take over control of the composition of the earth’s atmosphere (properly!) for centuries. So full speed ahead. Stay the course.

A glimpse of the coming battle lines for a climate stable enough to support advanced civilization.

In it, the the Alberta Environment Minister Renner admits he isn’t sure how much of the emissions from the oilsands can be captured by this technology.

“That’s why we are spending $2 billion to find out,” he said.

This is *NOT* the way CSS in oilsands has been sold to taxpayers or voters. Both the federal government and alberta government have consistently said oilsands are sustainable and expandable because CSS will capture their CO2 emissions.

Joe is right that the PR has been, and continues to be, at odds with what the government knows internally.

If it were an oil spill we would demand cleanup. We definitely need to figure out how to “put it back”. Hansen envisions burning biomass in powerplants and doing CSS on that to remove CO2 from the air.

But Joe is also right that Oil Sands folks, and Harper folks, have misled the public consistently on both actual impacts and how easy cleanup of Oil Sands will be.

Another point hidden from most folks about Oil Sands is that they are only barely a source of energy. The EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) is very low…around 10%. If you add CSS costs to this, however you do CSS, the Oil Sands stop being a net energy source at all. They are an ENERGY CONVERSION project. And this energy conversion project is one of the dirtiest on the planet.

Again this fact is hidden from public but well known by oil companies and governments.

If you want to spread truth and facts about the Oil Sands you should also include the fact that we only need this eco-disaster because we are not transforming our infrastructure from “oil” to other energy sources. Pickens says lets use the natural gas directly for transport. Many folks want electric transportation build out. Then their is better efficiency in transport…re-localization…on and on. Lots of ways to ditch oil sands with no energy loss to humanity.

Oil Sands = energy conversion process at huge ecological, social, political costs.

More truth and transparency of options available is needed all around.

The scientist quoted, i.e. David Keith, University of Calgary, is quoted in the CBC report as saying he is frustrated that all this money is going into carbon capture aimed at the process energy used at the tar sands projects. He is quoted saying that there is a lot of other places where a bigger bang for the buck in the way of emissions reductions could be achieved. But from the government’s point of view, given that both the Alberta and Canadian governments are full of climate change deniers, this is necessary research. They want to market the oil. The US, it seems to some in Canada, might not want oil that can be labelled “dirty” over the emissions of CO2 that result from its processing. So, where decades of arguments couldn’t get them to lift one finger to do anything on the climate front, they are now spending some serious money on carbon capture.

I say let them go to it. It might prove to be simply PR, in that these governments will either not spend the money, or they will just throw it away not doing any meaningful research, but it remains to be seen.

Joe Romm, of course, is clairvoyant, and he knows already that this is simply a PR exercise and nothing will come of it. Its all a “dead end”, he can say this now, and that is that.

A few facts, not that Joe would be interested in them: the energy used to process the oil out of the tar sand is said to result in 187 pounds of CO2 emissions, per barrel of oil produced, compared to an “average” of 62 pounds of CO2 emitted as conventional oil is produced. Figures like these are used in this CBC report, when the reporter states that tar sand oil production causes 3 times the emissions as it is produced, as conventional oil does. The CBC report states this is a maximum figure, as it brings up the fact that tar sand oil is very close to the US market compared to Saudi oil and states that the comparison can be less than 3 times depending on how far what you are comparing it to was transported. But lets say it is 3 times as much.

The professor Keith the CBC reporter goes to, the same one who is so frustrated that all this money is being spent on research into how to control tar sand oil processing emissions, has a pilot plant that can extract CO2 from ordinary air at an operating cost of 100 kw/hr of electricity per tonne of CO2 extracted.

http://www.ucalgary.ca/ news/ september2008/ keith-carboncapture

This electricity retails where I live for $7. But lets take an IPCC estimate for what it will cost to capture carbon dioxide and sequester it from coal plant exhaust as our figure to work with here. The IPCC says $20 – $45 per tonne, stored in the ground, assuming the burial location is within 200 km. So, to capture 182 pounds of CO2, if it were feasible, would cost perhaps as much as $4.

So, for what, $4 a barrel, the process emissions could be captured, making the oil less “dirty” to the US market? Oh that’s right, the tar sand processing emissions are not as pure CO2 as coal plant exhaust. Take the Rand figure for the tar sand then. Rand is saying $7. Whatever. Does this sound like so much money it will cause CCS to be not viable? Let’s not do any research into fleshing this out. Let’s pronounce now that if a government in Canada wants to spend some money on researching this, its all going to be a dead end.

I’ve never heard campaigners dump on technology that would remove a pollutant by ignoring data before. Perhaps I wasn’t paying attention. I remember when car makers were claiming they couldn’t do anything at a reasonable price over the smog their products were causing in urban areas, and the activists fighting them at that time were not telling the world that the technology was bogus and the only way forward was eliminating car production entirely. These days, a computer monitors almost every engine in the US fleet each revolution, calculating the optimum amount of fuel to inject for the next cycle, the exhaust is monitored, it is passed through expensive platinum catalysts, and the result, I hear, is a 97% improvement over what they started with back in the 1960s.

But CCS is all bogus. Its absolutely for sure, because Joe Romm says so.

The oil sands are certainly a very filthy source of energy, but it isn’t necessary to manipulate vocabulary to demonstrate that.