Canadian Oil Sands: More Oil Than Saudi Arabia?

Canada’s oil sands hold an estimated 170 billion barrels of oil that can be recovered with existing technology and as much as 1.7 trillion barrels — more than five times the size of Saudi Arabia’s reserves — that could be produced with the use of new methods that are being developed.

As the only non-OPEC source with the capability for large production growth during the next several years, oil sands have the potential to reduce the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ revenues, weakening the cartel and those members that often undertake policies hostile to U.S. interests.

By getting more of their oil from Canada, refineries in the Midwest are moving from being at the back of the crude oil supply line to the front. With these secure supplies, Midwest refineries are not as vulnerable to supply disruptions from overseas producers or hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico.

So who would object to Canadian oil sands?

Eenvironmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club are trying to shut down Canadian oil sands production and block the expansion of refineries here in the U.S.

If the environmental groups truly cared about achieving results in their battle against global warming, they would better focus their energy on the construction of scores of power plants in rapidly developing economies like China and India that account for most of the increase in the world’s carbon emissions. These developments pose the real global environmental danger, not the Canadian oil sands.

~From my editorial in today’s Detroit News

Subscribe by RSS Subscribe by Email