Opinions: Jim DiPeso's Blog

Contact Jim: jdipeso@rep.org (253) 740-2066 / 2009 Archive / 2008 Archive / 2007 Archive / 2006 Archive / 2005 Archive

Potholes in the Heavy Carbon Path to Energy Security

December 3, 2009

Climate change and energy security are two compelling drivers for finding less risky sources of the energy that a complex industrial civilization requires.

Often, they are cited in tandem, as mutually reinforcing reasons for diversifying our energy choices.

Usually, climate stewardship and energy security play well together. There is one way, however, in which they come into conflict – proposals to boost use of unconventional oil and coal found in abundance in North America to replace conventional crude oil as transportation fuel feedstocks.

It would be great news for energy security if such feedstocks could be extracted and converted into usable fuels at reasonable costs. It would be terrible news for climate change, however, because of the very large slugs of carbon that producing fuels from such sourcess would waft into the atmosphere.

From a climate stewardship perspective, if our only choices for fueling our vehicles are Texas oil, Ohio coal, Colorado shale, or Alberta tar sands, put us down for West Texas Intermediate any day of the week.

We’re not stuck with such choices. Nevertheless, once the economic recovery takes hold, petroleum demand rises, and oil prices shoot up, pressure will resume to take a heavy carbon path off the oil dependence treadmill.

Proponents of fuels from unconventional fossil sources, some of whom are ideologues who conflate carbon emissions with conservatism, point to their abundance as the golden road to a Valhalla of worry-free energy gluttony.

They should temper their enthusiasm. As an article in New Scientist pointed out recently, an all-you-can-drink carbon buffet isn’t opening anytime soon.

Start with Alberta’s tar sands, or, if you like, oil sands, the term preferred by producers.

Canada is producing 1.2 million barrels of oil per day by mining bitumen and turning it into liquid fuel. The process consumes huge volumes of natural gas to generate steam and to supply hydrogen necessary for turning bitumen into lighter hydrocarbons that can be refined into liquid fuel.

There are better uses for Canadian gas than firing up the oil sands teakettle, and researchers have come up with ingenious oil sands production methods that throttle back gas and water demand.

Even so, under the best of circumstances – high fuel demand, oil prices, and investments in oil sands production – the sands would still account for a modest share of global oil production decades from now.

In the most favorable scenario described by IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates in a May 2009 report, oil sands production rises to 6.3 million barrels daily by 2035. By then, according to the International Energy Agency, world oil demand under a business-as-usual scenario could be north of 100 million barrels per day, well above today’s consumption of 85 million barrels daily.

Oil shale, which actually is neither, won’t ride to the rescue. While hypesters like to say that there are the equivalent of 1 trillion barrels of oil or more buried in central Rockies shale formations, getting it out is, like oil-sands production, an energy-intensive process.

Shell is experimenting with a method of extracting oil from shale without digging it out of the ground. Given the newness of the technology and the testing required before the company can be sure that commercial production would pay, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated earlier this year that the soonest that the first commercial oil shale plant could be up and running would be 2023.

By 2030, production could hit 144,000 barrels per day – not a mom-and-pop operation, mind you, but little more than a nibble in the context of U.S. oil demand, which in this recession year was close to 20 million barrels per day.

For turning coal into liquid fuels, a big unknown is the economics of the process, especially if volatility in conventional oil prices clouds the prospect for building profitable coal-to-liquids plants. Startup plants would come with sticker shock - some $3.7 billion for a plant producing 50,000 barrels per day, according to a 2008 estimate from the National Energy Technology Laboratory. Replacing all imported oil with liquefied coal would require doubling of domestic coal production, according to lab figures.

And on top of all these obstacles, there are the unresolved technical, economic, and institutional problems involved with capturing and sequestering CO2 from industrial facilities producing megatons of the gas every year.

All the more reason to have more arrows in our energy quiver than carbon-rich fossil fuels, no matter how abundant they might be.