Every American...hell, everybody in the developed world should be terrified that the most powerful nation on Earth is acting as though TAR SANDS pipelines are going to save us all. That's what the Enbridge and the Keystone XL pipelines will be transporting: tar sands "oil"
If we as a civilization have come to the point where tar sands are a critical part of our energy mix, then peak oil isn't just real...........it's banging on our front door demanding to use our crapper. Tar sands oil returns 1/3 the energy that conventional oil does.
A THIRD.
This point isn't trivial: tar sands oil isn't "oil". At least not in the sense most folks think about it. It's not ol' Jed shootin' at some food and up from the ground comes a bubblin' crude - oil that is. Black gold. Texas tea.
No.
You don't just "get oil" from tar sands. You don't just jam a pipe in the ground and up it comes. You need to dump a LOT of energy into the tar sands to make it a useful form of oil. It takes massive amounts of water, it takes massive amounts of heat, from coal or natural gas, it takes more energy intensive transportation.
And the more energy you dump into PRODUCING oil, the less net energy you get OUT of it. As in a THIRD. You get a THIRD the energy output as from conventional oil.
The tar sands are bitumen.
bitumen is junk energy. A joule, or unit of energy, invested in extracting and processing bitumen returns only four to six joules in the form of crude oil. In contrast, conventional oil production in North America returns about 15 joules.
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Enbridge isn't EVEN transporting oil. It's not EVEN doing that. It's transporting the BOTTOM OF THE BARREL. HIGH energy cost of production, LOW ENERGY YIELD.
And THIS is supposed to save us. SAVE the United States?
Junk fuel? Bitumen?
Let's forget for a moment the environmental trainwreck this stuff is....this is what spilled into the Kalamazoo river not all that far from where I'm living, and because it SINKS rather than FLOATS, it's NEVER going to be completely cleaned. It's awful stuff. Oh...
And it was ENBRIDGE who was responsible for that Tar Sands "oil" spill of nearly a million gallons...the worse inland oil spill in America.
But let's forget about the horrific environmental impact of this stuff.
Tar sands oil is scraping the bottom of the barrel. HIGH energy investment, LOW energy yield. If we're turning to this as our national energy savior...........we are in SERIOUS trouble, folks.
We are in SERIOUS trouble. Just from an energy security standpoint. If we're turning to bitumen....it's because the high energy yield stuff is gone or too expensive to get at.
This is peak oil. THIS is what peak oil looks like.
When we as a society get to the point where it takes a joule of energy to extract a joule of energy..........that's when everything stops. The game is done. Our civilization is over.
And that's what the Enbridge and Keystone XL Pipelines represent: a reckless, desperate attempt at a dying energy model, rather than a move toward energy models that are long term and sustainable.
The Enbridge pipeline isn't a sign of plenty. It's a sign of how absolutely screwed we are if we continue down the path we've been going.
Now is your last chance to make a public statement.
Make it good.