Oil from tar sands and the Keystone Pipeline

By Engr. Edgar Mana-ay

In my March 16 article on world petroleum supply, I mentioned the nation of Canada as the No. 4 oil producer in the world at 5.27 million barrels per day (mbpd), about 5% of the world supply. What made the U.S. the No. 1 oil producer at 18 mbpd is a unique new oil source called shale oil, which is extracted by fracking, and the surge of Canada to No. 4 is lso because of a new and unique source called Tar Sands Oil. This is entirely different from shale oil of the U.S. and is removed 80 percent by in-situ production and 20 percent by open pit mining.

Oil sands, tar sands, crude bitumen or more technically bituminous sands are types of unconventional petroleum deposits very much different from the conventional shallow pool of pure crude oil found under the desert sands of Saudi Arabia. Tar sands are either loose sands or partially consolidated sandstone containing a naturally occurring mixture of sand, clay and water soaked with a dense and extremely viscous form of petroleum technically referred to as bitumen, which is thicker than molasses like substance. The last or residual product in “cooking” crude in the refinery is called asphalt used for road paving and repair (also technically termed by engineers as bitumen) and that is exactly how tar sands oil will look, only thinner than the commercial asphalt. In Canada, this is an increasingly common, abundant but expensive and dirty source of petroleum.

Bitumen are made of hydrocarbons – the same molecules in liquid oil that is used to produce gasoline and other petroleum products. Extracting bitumen from tar sands and refining it into products like gasoline is significantly costlier and more difficult than extracting and refining conventional oil (except shale oil which is also expensive to extract) under the ground. While tar sands oil have been in production since the late 1960s and currently account for 5% of all US gasoline, production has been scaling up and the need to transport tar sands oil to refineries in Texas is now more relevant than before.

Oil sands operations in Alberta, Canada are the world’s largest. Alberta has the world’s third largest proven oil reserves in tar sands deposit at 170 billion barrels! If tar sands resource is BELOW 75 meters underground, then it is removed by the so called Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD). This requires drilling of two horizontal wells (just like in shale oil drilling), one slightly higher than the other through the oil sand layer underground. Steam is injected continuously into the top well, and as temperature rises in what is called the “steam chamber,” the bitumen becomes more fluid and flows to the lower well, then pumped out to the surface.

For 20 percent of oil sands reservoir with a depth LESS than 75 meters, then the common Open Pit Mining method is used. The top soil cover including the trees in the forest (it is mostly forest area where tar sands deposits are located in Canada) are scraped off to expose the tar sands layer. Large shovels scoops oil sands into huge 150 tons dump trucks, then brought to a crusher and with hot water grinded to slurry so it can be pumped to the extraction plant. By the way, the largest dump trucks seen in Iloilo is 12 tons in capacity while these behemoth Haulpac 150 have tires 8 feet in diameter so that in case of a flat tire, the operator (not driver anymore) will radio for a crew equipped with a crane truck and pneumatic tire wrench to change the deflated tire. At the extraction plant, more hot water is added to this mixture of sand, clay, bitumen, and water, then settled. During settling, bitumen froth rises to the surface where it is removed, diluted with diesel and pumped thru long pipelines towards refineries in Texas designed to handle this type of heavy crude for “cooking” into gasoline, diesel and other chemical products like benzene, polyethylene the basic materials for plastics.

This is where the controversial Keystone pipeline will come in. Owned by TC Energy, this $8-billion, 1,200-mile long pipeline will carry 830,000 barrels per day extracted tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada passing through Montana, South Dakota to Nebraska where it would connect with the original Keystone pipeline that runs down to Texas Gulf Coast refineries. First proposed in 2008, the pipeline has become emblematic of the struggle between economic development and curbing the fossil fuel emissions that activists claim are causing climate change.

Finally, after being rejected for years by the Obama administration, President Trump in February 2020 allowed the Keystone pipeline to be built across US land despite the many court challenges that climate activists have filed. The activists not only object to the pipeline but also to the exploitation of oil from the tar sands. Among the objections are:

1. Burning tar sands oil will make climate change worse. This is unreasonable since the world is also burning oil from conventional source like Saudi Arabia and the U.S.
2. Pipeline could break and spill oil into water ways like Montana’s Missouri River. Pipelines are designed with flexible joints that will not break even at 8.0 intensity earthquakes. TC Energy had provided detailed plans to respond to any spill from the line.

As I have said over and over again, the world cannot do away with fossil fuel energy at least for the next one hundred years. Science have not yet reach a level that a substitute energy source can sufficiently serve the needs of man at cost competitive to fossil fuels. Until that science excellence is reached, then we have to continue developing all types of fossil fuel source, be it tar sands oil or shale oil, otherwise if we give in to climate activists objections, we will impede progress of civilization for there is no viable energy substitute until now.