That oil was already in the ground in our country and in CA it seeps to the surface with or without help.
There’s nothing more natural than crude.
So all of the environmentalists are freaking out about this but they are forgetting that the oil came from the ground in the first place 
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As long as we use oil there will be incidents. Anyone here willing to give up oil & oil products?
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Well, I’m a big proponent of renewables and alternatives. It would be nice for that to grow the necessary support and R&D that would lead to replacing them.
Not possible.
Just a partial list of 6000 products produced from petroleum.
What will women do without nail polish, lipstick, panty hose…or credit cards. Or soyboys without their purses, insect repellent and petroleum jelly. 
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Fracking is typically conducted in shale beds to release trapped natural gas. If done properly (that’s always the key right) it’s not usually hazardous.
It’s all ancient formations, and there is a bottom to the barrel no matter how far off that may be.
HYDROGEN is the fuel of the future. Clean & inexhaustible. Just a matter of the research paying off. Patience. Remember when I said, it took a good 100+ years to go from wax cylinder audio recordings to digital. In the scheme of things a short time.
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Hydrogen has the highest energy content of any common fuel by weight. On the other hand, hydrogen has the lowest energy content by volume. It is the lightest element, and it is a gas at normal temperature and pressure.
Hydrogen as an Energy Carrier
Hydrogen is considered as a secondary source of energy, commonly referred to as an energy carrier. Energy carriers are used to move, store and deliver energy in a form that can be easily used. Electricity is the most well-known example of an energy carrier.
Hydrogen as an important energy carrier in the future has a number of advantages. For example, a large volume of hydrogen can be easily stored in a number of different ways, including underground hydrogen storage, compressed hydrogen in tanks, or through chemical compounds that release hydrogen after heating.
Hydrogen is also considered as a high efficiency, low polluting fuel that can be used for transportation, heating, and power generation in places where it is difficult to use electricity. In some instances, it is cheaper to ship hydrogen by pipeline than sending electricity over long distances by wire.
The problem is the energy required to produce it.
Chevron has been doing this “steam lift” for decades in Bakersfield. The oil is shallow and they’ve been nursing that field for 100 years, still producing buttloads of oil. That’s given them the best know-how for helping countries with goopy oil to get it out of the ground.
You need to generate 2 or 3 pounds of steam per pound of oil, so any place that has tar sands at the surface would better be scooped and shoveled, as murderous as that is on materials processing equipment. The standard process for recovering tar sands is milling and stirring it with hot water, but that’s a lot less energy-intensive than making steam.
Remember when I said, it took a good 100+ years to go from wax cylinder audio recordings to digital. In the scheme of things a short time. Hydrogen as a fuel source is well worth the time, energy, and money for research. 22 TRILLION in the toilet for the failed War on Poverty. If that 22 Trillion was converted into $1.00 bills & burned, it would have produced a lot of energy, instead of just wasting it. 1 Trillion in $1.00 bills weighs 1,102,311 tons. The ballpark btu figure is The available heat value is then 7,100 Btu per pound (0.83 pound x 8,600 Btu /pound). Now Xs it by 1,102,311 tons converted to pounds, and then by 22
Is that what Canadians are doing with there tar sands? Scooping it up and taken top steamer or heating process?
It’s dirty, and extremely pollutant from what I heard.
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Exactly and that’s the biggest complaint from the environmentalists.
Yep, not that polluting I think but managing the effluent water with the fine solids is an enormous problem, they have vast settling ponds
Hydrogen as a transportation fuel is vastly inferior to gasoline or diesel. For the energy you get out of a gallon of gasoline you need highly compressed hydrogen in a big cylinder. Try getting Bubba to fill that up at a service station while he’s smoking a cigarette.
I’ve heard that carbon output from the tar sands had prevented Canada from meeting it’s goals of carbon limits by a large factor. I’ll have to find that article when I get a chance.
That could be. I’m pretty sure that the cost of producing a barrel of “syncrude” is among the highest of any oil produced.
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If I recall they need at least 50 a barrel to break even.
Let me check.
This artilce from Reuters is just under 2 years old.
One of those is Athabasca Oil Corp’s (ATH.TO) Hangingstone project. It was originally conceived as a 80,000 bpd project, but instead will bring output to only 12,000 bpd from the current 9,000 bpd. The project can break even with U.S. crude prices of at least $53 a barrel, meaning right now Athabasca keeps losing money on Hangingstone production. Size is crucial in the oil sands; the more bitumen a company can squeeze out of a plant, the lower fixed costs per barrel will be.
I hope the source is acceptable.