This is the first in a two-part series about Canada's oil sands. In this post, I will talk about a recent American Petroleum Institute (API)-sponsored media trip I made to see Canada's oil sands, and give a little background on material being extracted. In the second part of the series, I will talk about future oil sands production and some issues related to future imports, including environmental questions.

I should mention that while I went on the trip with API, the sources I am using in these two posts are broader than just information on the trip. I will link to some of these sources as I go along. Arguably this post is mostly from the point of view of oil companies, but it seems to me our knowledge base regarding oil sands is so poor that we need to start somewhere.

The group that went on the trip was a mixed group of bloggers and a conventional reporter--Elizabeth Brackett from PBS. This is a photo of some of us.

With arctic sovereignty increasingly in dispute due to potential oil and gas discoveries in a warmer world, the various interested parties seem almost desperate to stake their claim (and some are apparently more desperate than others). Meanwhile sovereignty debates continue further south at the Montebello SPP summit.

Danny Williams (one scary poker player), finally suceeds in securing a deal on the Hebron field after calling the oil companies' bluff. They said they had plenty of other opportunities if Newfoundland wouldn't play ball, but in a peak oil world Williams said they'd come back to the table, and they did.

As for the developing credit crunch, risk appears less and less contained over time, as international concern grows over the highy-rated 'assets' derived from the American mortgage market. Even money market funds are beginning to experience a flight to quality.

Russian arctic images 'from Titanic'

Russia faces embarrassment over its flag planting expedition to the North Pole after claims that state broadcasters borrowed scenes from the movie Titanic to "beef-up" footage. Television company Rossiya sent images of mini submarines descending to the ocean floor around the world in its report about the mission.

But a 13-year-old boy from Finland spotted the scenes in the national daily newspaper Ilta-Sanomat, and realised that they resembled images on his Titanic DVD.

He told the newspaper: "I checked it with my DVD and there it was right there in the beginning of the movie: exactly the same image of the submersibles approaching the ship."

Titanic, made by James Cameron and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, opens with pictures of divers inspecting the 1912 shipwreck. The news programme is accused of merging real footage with the movie shots under the caption "northern Arctic Ocean", according to the Guardian.

It reported that Rossiya had refused to comment on the footage but said its Vesti news programme had originally been filmed using scale models in a studio.

The "missing link" to the Uppsala paper (pdf) has been corrected.

I was investigating sour gas and it turned out that about 30% of the gas produced in the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin (WCSB) is sour. As things do, one thing led to another and I found that this gas can be "sweetened" and used although it contains H2S (hydrogen sulfide), which is toxic at levels as low 10 ppm (parts per million). However, the real path and story became natural gas usage to carry out production of the tar sands.

There turns out to be a worrisome supply issue. Here are some claims made about tar sand production going forward.

Predictions for Tar Sands Oil Production
Figure 1 -- Click to Enlarge

However, tar sands production of approximately 1.0/mbd in 2005 also used 0.72/bcf (billion cubic feet) of natural gas as I read in this brief press release.

According to the NEB's [National Energy Board of Canada] 2006 oil sands Energy Market Assessment, the amount of gas used in oil sands production will rise to 2.1 billion cubic feet a day in 2015 from about 700 million cubic feet last year....

"We don't see any issues on gas availability," said Bill Wall, oil technical specialist for the NEB.

Will Canada complacently allow the US to pillage her resources as energy supplies become more scarce?  Further, will she become discontented enough with that idea to cause a political rift between Canada and the US when she sees her own future energy security being compromised?  Will the NAFTA energy sharing provisions hold up, maintaining fungibility of scarce resources?  There seem to be many questions that need to be asked about this supposed panacea of a relationship; some ideas of the potential answers under the fold.