ARE CANADIAN OIL SANDS THE ANSWER?

There’s lots of talk on the financial channels this morning regarding all of the untapped possibilities that we can explore to supply our country’s need for oil in the coming years. Canadian oil sands have been getting a lot of coverage because they say there is more oil in that sand in Canada than there is in all of Saudi Arabia. It’s an expensive process to extract the oil from the sand. It has to be heated to separate the two and that eats up the profit per barrel. I believe I heard mention of a price of $30 per barrel. In these days of $100 plus prices for a barrel of the black gold 30 bucks seems like a piddling amount doesn’t? Therefore, we can probably look for daily oil production in Canada to start kicking butt if it hasn’t already.

In addition to the possibilities for Canadian oil sands, they mentioned something called oil shale. They reported that our own state of Colorado is loaded with this wonderful stuff. While I was listening to the repartee, my thoughts were drifting along the lines of , “Wow, shale oil mining might be really good to hold us short term and keep all that money from floating out of the country for the few years (a decade at most) that it will take to get solar and wind power developed. Then all of a sudden somebody throws out the date of 2035. Twenty freaking thirty five? If I’m not mistaken that’s how long they said it would take to start to take advantage of the glorious oil shale in Colorado.

My thoughts are that if we are still relying on fossil fuels for the next two decades, we are going to be in such deep environmental poop by that time that oil is going to be the least of our concerns. Why is everybody acting like Canadian oil sands or Colorado oil shale is the answer to our problems? They might put a bandage on energy problems, but if we don’t get a handle on what we are doing to the environment the increase in natural disasters is going to negate the benefits from what we are being told.

What say the rest of you; are we still going to be an oil sucking, global warming society in two decades or will we be well on our way towards correcting the wrongs that we have done to earth? Should I start telling my kids that they should prepare for careers in selling ocean front real estate in Tennessee? Perhaps we will be teaching the children in school about the "Lost Civilization of New Orleans" as well as the "Lost City of Atlantis"?