This is a follow-up to Part 1, which tells about my recent trip to Canada's oil sands, on a trip sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute (API).

In Part 2 of this post, I provide some additional thoughts to help the reader come to his / her own conclusions about the future of the oil sands. I talk a little about how Canada's oil sands production fits in with its other sources of supply, and how this in turn relates to Canada's exports. I also look a little at some political issues and how these fit in with environmental issues. A closely related post is this recent post.

How much will oil sands production expand in the future?

There is no doubt that there is a huge amount of resource in place - between 1.7 and 2.5 trillion barrels, according to the Oil Sands Discovery Centre's Oil Sands Story. Of this, 173 billion barrels (about 10%) is considered producible with current technology at 2006 prices ($66 barrel for WTI). Production to date has been relatively low, though--only 1.2 million barrels a day in 2008, according to Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP).

Matt Mushalik from Australia was good enough to send me this graph of world oil exports, calculated from new oil data provided by the EIA.

Figure 1. World net exports, based on EIA data

This inspired me to put together a few other somewhat related graphs, relating to oil exports and US imports. Since Canada is such a tiny piece of world exports, but seems to be mentioned as a possible major source of future US imports, I have looked at it separately as well.

The likelihood of a huge ramp up in imports from Canada seems remote. Canadian exports to the US require continued imports to the East Coast of Canada. If imports of oil to Canada decline as world exports decline, US oil imports from Canada may also decline, because ramped up production from oil sands may not be enough to offset declines in production and imports elsewhere.

This is third in a series of six guest posts by Professor Charles Hall of the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry describing the energy statistic, "EROI" for various fuels. As has been discussed often on this site, net energy analysis is a vitally important concept - just as we primarily care about our take home pay which is our salary minus the taxes, we should care about our 'take home' energy, which is what is left after energy costs have been accounted for. As important as it is, this measure is not easy to quantify, as: a)data is almost always measured in $ as opposed to energy terms, b) parsing non-energy inputs (and outputs) into energy terms is difficult, and c) analysis boundaries (including environmental impacts) are very disparate. As such, there is not (has not yet been) a consistent formula for EROI applied to all energy studies that has led to policymakers and analysts speaking the same language in useful ways. The lead paper in this months Royal Academy of Sweden's journal AMBIO will be about such an EROI framework, and we will link to it when it comes online.

Professor Hall has been working in this area for over 30 years. Below are net energy analysis from Hall's group on the unconventional oil sources from tar sands and oil shaletwo resources that theoretically are enormous in energy scale, but practically are limited by flow rates, costs, and externalities. Just how limited is the subject of todays two-part informative post is below the fold. Remember, any specific numerical help via referenced literature, personal experience or knowledge to better inform Dr. Hall and his students would be appreciated.

In Alberta, the debate of the the tar sands royalty review is heating up. Major companies are threatening to pull investments in the province, while other point out that a peaking world offers them few other options. The environmental effects of large-scale bitumen mining, which are not considered often enough, are discussed in detail in journalist Willam Marsden's new book.

On the other side of the country, LNG shipments seem set to ignite a political row over safety in narrow shipping lanes. Nuclear appears to be approaching a revival, although cost is an issue. The effects of climate change are making themselves felt across the globe, notably in the Australia and in the Arctic, where Inuit climate change campaigner Sheila Watt-Cloutier could be about to share the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. (More under the fold!)