![]() oil shale could have similar problems too. The Canadian oil sands have come in for acute criticism on this front,Īnd many fear U.S. Important: carbon emissions from new sources of oil are unusually high. “Beyond Coal” since 2002, added “Beyond Oil” after the BP spill in 2010Īnd then launched “Beyond Natural Gas” in 2012.Īll of this, many scientists and advocates argue, misses something The Alberta oil sands.7 The Sierra Club, which had campaigned to move Was nearly ten times more much carbon in the world’s gas fields than in Massiveĭeposits of shale gas, recently unlocked, had struck many similarly: there Source of oil raised alarms when juxtaposed with increasing concernsĪbout climate change, which scientists were confident was being accelerated by the carbon dioxide produced from burning fossil fuels. The outer continental shelf, Alaska, tight oil, oil shale each Americans were rapidly tapping into ever bigger pools of The sentiment made instinctive sense, and not only when it came to Need one more huge source of oil pouring in.”6 Get off oil,” McKibben emphasized the day after his release. The disparate group had tapped into something much deeper than concern about a single pipeline. The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future If we are to prevent runaway climate change, it will be, in part, because these projects never get off the ground. Projects for tar sands expansion-and possible resistance to such projects-have gone global. Such development prospects are at the stage where the tar sands and related oil shale projects would become hard-wired into the energy grid, at a time when we need the exact opposite. The goal of this chapter is to give a series of snapshots that help to illustrate the rapid race into bitumen and kerogen extraction that is occurring around the world.Īgain, the Canadian tar sands are connected, as key technologies there are expected to contribute to new oil shale extraction projects, and it is notable that Canadian start-up company Global Oil Shale Holdings entered into contracts with the government of Jordan in the fall of 2012.23 Given the ways in which fracking supports tar sands projects, and given the serious environmental risks associated with fracking, it is extremely deceptive and egregious to call fracked gas a “transition fuel,” as both industry and some environmental organizations do.1 In terms of their greenhouse gas emissions per barrel, their climate impacts are even greater than tar sands extraction and processing.Īlthough the expansion of fracking for “tight” oil and natural gas is geologically and technologically very distinct from bitumen-based tar sands and kerogen-based oil shale, they are becoming heavily interrelated because the rapid influx of natural gas released by fracking is serving to reduce overhead energy costs into the tar sands and similar developments. Much like bitumen, kerogen is a proto-crude oil, in that it is essentially a building block that can be processed into crude oil after being mined or extracted in situ using vast quantities of energy (for heating) and often tremendous amounts of water to separate the proto-oil from the bearing rock. Oil shale, on the other hand, describes rocks that are fused with kerogen and set in geological formations similar to tar sands bitumen. In the case of fracked oil, the crude oil itself is not from shale, which is why “tight oil” is more accurate than shale oil, as it is sometimes referred to (“tight” oil should be read as code for fracking). Fracking is a procedure that releases normal liquid crude and natural gas from formations of shale that were impossible to recover prior to new fracking technologies. Such extreme extraction has also come with considerable confusion, as there is a fundamental difference between fracking for “tight” oil and mining for oil shale, or kerogen. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Happiness index / gross national happiness, A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice
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