[extropy-chat] OIL: Albertan tar sands, was Peak Oil?

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> "The energy balance is favorable; under a conservative life-cycle 
> analysis, it should yield 3.5 units of energy for every 1 unit used 
> in production."
> 
> =Let's burn some fossil hydrocarbons so we have process heat to
> extract
> fossil hydrocarbons so we can burn those fossil hydrocarbons, too.
> This is not very good. Using nuclear process heat to extract fossil
> hydrocarbons just for chemical feedstock is only moderately better. 

Ah.  True - but it strikes me that solar heaters would be ideal for
this sort of thing.  Easy to port from field to field (moreso than
nuclear or even fossil fueled, with no reactor or combustion chamber),
no waste products (after the solar panels have been manufactured), et
cetera and so forth.

> Also:
>
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=oil+shale+problem&btnG=Google+Search

This wouldn't necessarily reflect very recent advances, such as the
one in the article, which might not yet have been widely written up (or
at least made it into Google's cache yet).