Is Alberta's Heavy Oil the Key to Energy Independence?

[Ivan Seeking]

...Alberta sits atop the biggest petroleum deposit outside the Arabian peninsula - as many as 300 billion recoverable barrels and another trillion-plus barrels that could one day be within reach using new retrieval methods. (By contrast, the entire Middle East holds an estimated 685 billion barrels that are recoverable.) But there's a catch. Alberta's black gold isn't the stuff that geysered up from Jed Clampett's backyard. It's more like a mix of Silly Putty and coffee grounds - think of the tar patties that stick to the bottom of your sandals at the beach - and it's trapped beneath hundreds of feet of clay and rock.

This petroleum dreck is known in these parts as heavy oil, and wildcatters are determined to get it out of the ground and into a pipeline. If they succeed, the stereotypical oil zillionaire may be not an Arabian emir but a folksy Albertan fond of ending sentences in a question, eh? ...

...Heavy oil isn't a new discovery. Native Americans have used it to caulk their canoes for centuries. Until recently, though, it's been the energy industry's stepchild - ugly, dirty, and hard to refine. But the political winds are favoring the heavy stuff, as "energy independence" - aka freedom from relying on Middle East oil - has become a war-on-terror buzz-phrase. Even President Bush has waxed optimistic about Alberta's "tar pits." [continued]

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.07/oil.html?tw=wn_tophead_8

 

[Robert Zaleski]

Also notable, is the Green River Formation of Utah, Wyoming and Colorado, which contains an estimated 1.5 trillion barrels of oil trapped in shale rock.

 

[selfAdjoint]

And they all get brought up every time the price of gas goes up. My late wife, right at the time we were married, made a little killing on a tiny company called "Utah Shale". Its stock went from 3 to 30 in a few weeks after the middle eastern oil facilities were nationalized. We used the profits to buy our first house.