[wjersey]

When are we going to start using US oil sands?

[muawiyah]

Obviously we will "mine" our own tar-sands when we need them. In the meantime let's "mine" Alberta's. There are also oil shales in vast abundance, and coal.

[Energy Alley]

we have similar deposits, but they are even more difficult and expensive to extract than the Albertan deposits as ours are mostly in the form of Oil Shale.

Extremely messy stuff to work with and extremely expensive to extract.

[Candor7]

"Enbridge, a Calgary-based oil delivery and storage company, opened the taps to its Spearhead Pipeline, a 650-mile stretch of steel from Chicago to Cushing, and the first western Canada crude sloshed into the company's mammoth Cushing terminal early Thursday. "

Yes! The Canadian Wing Nut Liberals wanted this NOt to happen for so long, and even placed an oil export tax on Alberta oil.

Now oil is up enough to export, pay the Canadian Fed Export tax, AND make a profit.

I love it when Canadian Socialist Liberal Wing Nut isolationist policy is traduced by capitalism!!!!

[kittymyrib]

If our enviro-nazis have managed to keep ANWAR, the Pacific Coast and the Florida coast out of production, I'm sure they'll frighten enough spineless Congressmen to oppose bringing in the US oil sands. Canada will be able to put OPEC out of business, though, and that will be great! I hope the east and west coasts have to pay $5/gal. for this new oil. It would serve them right.

[Tzimisce]

How can this be? Canada signed Kyoto - it should be one of the cleanest nations in the world!

[Edit35]

Good. I own Enbridge stock.

[BW2221]

We really need to try to trade New England for Alberta.

[lexington minuteman 1775]

And this deal completely bypasses Louisiana, by the pipeling going into Oklahoma, how long before somebody pulls the race card????bwahahahahaha!

[RayChuang88]

What makes the oil sands even more extractable is Royal Dutch Shell's recent announcement of using steam injection and oil shale heating to remove the oil in situ without having to actually dig out the shale. A modified version of this technology could make it possible to extract out the oil from the tar sands without having to dig out the tar sands directly, which could suddenly open something like 1.7 trillion barrels of crude oil that could be pumped out! That is essentially 1/3 of the world's known oil supply. Combine that with 1.1 trillion barrels of oil that could be potentially extracted just from the USA alone and we're talking more oil combined than all of the entire Middle East and the Caspian Sea.

If we combine oil shale/oil tar sands plus modern coal liquefaction and oil-laden algae production, we could essentially eliminate all oil imports and North America could even end up being an oil exporter in the 21st Century. OPEC would instead end up being the world's latest natural gas producer as petroleum gas now being burned off in the Persian Gulf and in Nigeria are instead liquified and pumped on trancontinental pipelines to LNG terminals on the northern coast of Africa and Lebanon/Syria to be shipped to Europe via LNG tankers.

[Smokin' Joe]

Just where are the US oil Sands like those in Alberta? I know we have oil shale, but that is a horse of a different color in terms of extraction.