Like them or hate them, Alberta, Canada’s tar sands deposits of bitumen or extremely heavy crude oil, are the world’s largest. The province’s resources include the Athabasca, Peace River and Cold Lake deposits in the McMurray Formation, which consist of a mixture of crude bitumen, a semi-solid form of crude oil, admixed with silica sand, clay minerals, and water.
According to the U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration, “Canada controls the third-largest amount of proven reserves in the world, after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela… Canada's proven oil reserve levels have been stagnant or slightly declining since 2003, when they increased by an order of magnitude after oil sands resources were deemed to be technically and economically recoverable. The oil sands now account for approximately 170 billion barrels, or 98 percent, of Canada's oil reserves.”
Lying under 54,000 square miles of forest and bogs, the bitumen tar sands are estimated to be comparable in magnitude to the world's total proven reserves of conventional petroleum.
But exploiting the tar sands comes at a significant environmental cost.
Oil sands pollution is not a topic that Ottawa is keen to publicize. In 2009 the Canadian government acknowledged that it deliberately had excluded data indicating a 20 percent increase in annual pollution from Canada’s oil sands industry from a 567-page report on climate change that it was required to submit to the United Nations.
Quite aside from the despoliation of the landscape, Alberta’s oil sands have been found to be one of the major causes of air pollution in Canada, as Tar sands facilities were found to be among the top four highest polluters of volatile organic compounds, a major air contaminant, along with acid rain.
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That pollution rap sheet could soon include nuclear, as Toshiba is developing “mini” nuclear reactors to be used to mine Canadian oil sands, with an initial deployment projected by 2020.
Why nuclear power? It is estimated that approximately 90 percent of the Alberta oil sands are too far below the surface to use open-pit mining. Making liquid fuels from oil sands requires energy for steam injection and refining. Mining oil sands is water intensive; drilling one well consumes 5.5 acre-feet of water each year, and the production of one gallon of oil requires thirty-five gallons of water.
Toshiba's new mini reactor will produce only 10,000-50,000 kilowatts, about one to five percent the power of a regular nuclear reactor, according to company sources, with the steam generated in the reactor pumped underground. Toshiba reportedly plans to construct a nuclear reactor building underground, with an earthquake-absorbing structure.
Besides potential earthquakes, the buried reactor will have to cope with temperatures as cold as –40C in winter and 30C in the summer.
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Toshiba is not the only Asian company to tout for business in Alberta’s oil sands. Last year China’s CNOOC Ltd. spent $15.1 billion to acquire oil sands producer Nexen Inc., but the deal was controversial. Accordingly, Wenran Jiang, a senior fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and senior adviser to the Alberta energy department noted, “They feel the oil sands projects are too large in pre-capital investment and take too long to get to the market.”
But Ottawa is not discouraged over its oil sands future. The Canadian Energy Research Institute estimates that Canadian employment as a result of new oil sands investments is expected to grow from 75,000 in 2010 to 905,000 by 2035 and that oil sands developments overall will contribute $2.1 trillion to the Canadian economy over the next 25 years.
The wisdom of dotting Canada’s remote northern landscape with mini reactors has yet to be debated, but with Harper’s conservative government and the figures stated above, it seems likely that mini reactors in the Great White North are most likely a done deal.
By. John C.K. Daly of Oilprice.com
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we don't have a problem burning coal, gas, oil for energy.
nuclear waste / decommisssioning is still a huge issue without resolution on the horizon.
solve that and its game-change
I've had it with these attack dogs! If "they" want to target us - we will target them (and their career lawyers)
The fact that the "greens" are against nuclear power as an alternative to using fossil to get the oil out of the tar sands is a testament to how far the "greens" are from an actual environmental group. Their blind hatred for nuclear power keeps them from realizing that nuclear power is one of the most, if not the most, clean ways to generate large amount of electricity.
Also, the statement that nuclear power will add to the "pollution rap-sheet" is clearly biased. Nuclear power would reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of the oilsands projects. A balanced discussion would present this advantage alongside the question of nuclear waste disposal.
The tar sands are a tremendous resource, no doubt, and nuclear might be one way to address the GHG issue but much of that particular problem has to do with the rate of development as it does with the methods of extraction; it almost goes without saying (that's why the article skirts it) that the big problems with nuclear are operational meltdown and waste disposal, neither of which has been satisfactorily solved.
You know Big Oil is feeling the heat from increasingly conscious Canadians over environmental issues. One sign is that they are playing the nuclear card now, so soon after Fukushima, instead of waiting for things to cool off like after Chernobyl. And they are probably justified in feeling nervous: the Albetarian pipeline is about to be quashed by the incoming NDP government in BC and Harper's majority is probably too far gone to salvage; as BC Liberal and Harper Conservatives get sent packing, so goes the head-off development, by any means, of the tar sands.
Around 30% of the energy in the bitumen is lost in the processings so a barrel of bitumen has only a 70% oil equivalent. So using nuclear fission just for steam raising is only one contribution to the tarsands economy.
This is the other side of the nuclear equation that regulatory agencies who claim to hold public safety as paramount forget: the cost to public health from the alternative to nuclear, fossil fuel.
I recommended in Ch 9 to gasify the heaviest portion (asphaltenes)of the bitumen that is most difficult and expensive to upgrade to produce heat for SAGD steam. Gasifier is costly (but less than nuclear) but recommended (not burner) in order to capture CO2 and reduce SOx/NOx emissions.
Further, Nuclear is not an easy solution as it sounds, please see further in page 164 I wrote, "Currently, in-situ bitumen production in Alberta exceeds one million barrels per day. So it will take four nuclear reactors of 1,000 MWe capacity each to meet the energy demand just for the steam for bitumen production. Then, what about the additional energy required for further upgrading and transportation".