Following the battle over bitumen is like following a small car full of clowns. You never know what will happen next. The latest on bitumen is that a study published in the U.S. science journal Nature Climate Change has claimed that the U.S. State Department figures on greenhouse gasses from the Keystone XL pipeline are wrong. The authors are saying that greenhouse gasses emissions estimated by the State Department were underestimated by a factor of about four times.
What you might remember is that we humans are pumping some billions of metric tonnes of carbon into the earth’s atmosphere every year. It is only the rapid melting polar ice caps and drastically changing weather that are bringing more people on side in wanting to reduce these emissions.
The premise the authors are using in this new math is that the availability of bitumen to be refined into synthetic crude oil will reduce the cost of oil. This, they claim, will automatically increase the use of oil. The State Department said that refining the more than 800,000 barrels of bitumen that can be pumped down to Texas every day will increase greenhouse gas emissions by between 1.3 and 27.4 million metric tonnes annually. The authors say these figures are wrong. They estimate the increase in usage will add between 100 million to 110 million metric tonnes of carbon every year.
In as much as President Obama has said that he will not approve the Keystone XL pipeline if it increases carbon emissions, you may be sure that the authors will want to share their findings with him.
But we do not think he reads Babel-on-the-Bay. And our best guess is that he will turn down the Keystone XL proposal anyway. That means we can tell you the truth despite the bad math and bad science being used by both sides of the argument.
Canadian bitumen is unlikely to make any difference at all in the carbon emissions from the Texas refineries. Those refineries can get all the bitumen they might want from tar sands in Utah and from Venezuela’s Orinoco region. Sure Alberta has lots of tar sands it wants to sell but so does Venezuela and that county’s cost of labour is much lower. They can call it heavy oil all they want but it still is a highly polluting process to convert it to synthetic crude oil. And then you still have to refine it to produce gasoline and other oil products.
The simple facts are that Alberta is land-locked and is desperate to ship its bitumen to countries that do not care about pollution. Any coastal location where ocean-going tankers can reach is fine. South to the Texas Gulf oil ports, west to Kitimat or Surrey in B.C. or east to Montreal or Saint John, New Brunswick will do.
The exploitation companies want to sell bitumen to make a profit. There are Albertans who want to sell bitumen so that they do not have sales taxes. Less scrupulous refineries will process bitumen if it is cheaper. None of these clowns seem to care about our world environment. It all boils down to greed.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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