As a follow up to last month’s Five Friday Facts on tar sands, come another set, also from Andrew Nikiforuk’s Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent:
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It takes approximately 1,400 cubic feet of natural gas to produce and upgrade a barrel of bitumen. A barrel of bitumen is equal to the energy in 4-4,500 cubic feet of natural gas.
If the tar sands produced five million barrels a day, oil companies would consume 60 percent of the natural gas available in western Canada by 2030.
On average, open-pit mines require 12 barrels of water to make one barrel of bitumen. While companies such as Syncrude recycle their water as many as 18 times, every barrel of bitumen consumes a net average of 3 barrels of potable water.
By 2015, the tar sands will consume 16 percent of Canada’s natural gas supply, enough energy to heat roughly 12 million homes, 24 hours a day.
The Darlington and Pickering nuclear facilities in Ontario require approximately 2 trillion gallons of water for cooling annually, about 19 times more water than the tar sands use.
Bonus fact:
- A 2006 department of energy (US) study, reports that 80 percent of electricity generation in the US comes from thermoelectric sources (fossil fuels and nuclear), accounting for 40% of all freshwater withdrawals, mostly for cooling.
Image source: Metropolitan Museum of Art
