Utah’s Oil Sands: Riches or Ruin?

By Amy Seigel, 9-28-06

So often in the West we are asked to make a choice between preserving natural resources and enabling economic growth. Utah’s fragile desert landscapes are unique, not only in their natural beauty, but also because of the wealth, in the form of buried hydrocarbons, they contain. Last week’s article about the 10th anniversary of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument detailed the controversy surrounding the proposed Andalex coal mine on the Kaiparowits Plateau, and the debate between local economy and the environment. Last Thursday, at the Western Oil Sands Conference at the University of Utah, this very same debate was played out on a large scale—only this time the resource was not coal, but some unsung substances known as “tar sands” or “oil sands.”

Oil sands, a combination of clay, sand, water, and bitumen, are mined to extract the oil-like bitumen which is then upgraded into synthetic crude oil or refined into petroleum products. The Intermountain West—Utah, Colorado and Wyoming—is fortunate, or perhaps unfortunate enough to have potentially a trillion barrels of oil, more than the resources of the entire Middle East, trapped in these deposits. As luck would have it, however, these oil sands deposits aren’t located in some desolate place like the no man’s land of Utah’s West Desert, but rather underneath some of the state’s most awesome and treasured public lands: Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Canyonlands National Park and the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.

In an interview on KUER’s Radio West, Stephen Bloch of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, noted that “Whether or not this resource [tar sands] is going to be developed depends not only on the technology and the economics, but there are real serious environmental concerns that the environmental community, and indeed all Americans, are going to have about tapping into this resource.” In Alberta, Canada, home to the world’s largest operational oil sands mining operation, the damage done to the environment is terrifying. While oil sands can be mined through in situ processes—using steam, chemicals or other forms of heat in a “SAGD,” or “steam assisted gravity drainage” process that leaves only a minimal surface footprint—the majority of the Canadian operations are strip mines. “Essentially, it’s the process of turning the earth inside out,” says Bloch. “They are moving enough dirt and sands in two days to fill up Yankee Stadium, is the figure that gets thrown around. The sands are then refined on site.”

However, the mining footprint is not the only environmental concern. In his keynote address at this past Thursday’s conference at the University of Utah, “Oil Sands Development in a Carbon Constrained World,” John McDougall of the Alberta Research Council focused on the special problem of dealing with greenhouse emissions from the process of mining these oil sands. According to McDougall, the emissions from the upgrading process are around 75-90 kg of CO2 equivalent/barrel, while the mining equipment, trucks and tailings ponds add an additional 40 kg/barrel.

Furthermore, Bloch notes that “to produce 100,000 barrels of oil a day out of the shell in situ operations, would take essentially all the power from the largest power plant in the state of Colorado.” The real question, then, when it comes to the mining of oil sands and oil shale, seems to be whether these operations are destined to operate at an energy deficit, and produce an awful lot of greenhouse emissions in the process.

According to Bloch, there doesn’t seem to be much hope of ever recouping enough energy to justify the environmental devastation, “It takes close to or more natural gas to produce the oil at the end of the day than what’s put in,” says Bloch. Add to that the fact that we just don’t have a good idea of how much recoverable oil is even present in the state, and it becomes clear that this may be a resource that is quite simply not worth the trouble of extraction. “The state of Utah has about 3 percent of North America’s known and predicted tar sand resources, and that 3 percent figure includes no technically or economically recoverable screens on it,” says Bloch.

In the same Radio West interview, University of Utah Professor Philip Smith put these percentages into perspective by noting that while no one is absolutely certain of the extent of Utah’s oil sands deposits, “what we do know is that currently there’s around 12 million barrels of this bitumen in place. In Alberta there’s around a trillion.” Obviously, Utah’s number is significantly lower. While Professor Smith also noted that some scientists believe that there might be as much as 32 billion barrels of recoverable bitumen in Utah, all of these numbers must be “set against whether it’s worth it, environmentally and so on.”

But there is another side to this debate, one that might push scientists towards finding some solutions to the environmental difficulties inherent in the process of mining these heavy oil deposits. Clearly, much of the interest in these operations is centered around State and National economic growth—these are huge operations that employ vast numbers of workers, and all the money used to produce this oil says in the country. But even more importantly, oil sands might provide the U.S. with something it desperately needs in these troubled times—its own, domestic oil sources. “I think why we see so much interest currently in the oil sands oil shale debate, is because of the domestic sources, because of the strategic issues that are centered around these kind of questions,” says Professor Smith. And indeed, it is possible that the true deciding factor in whether or not the oil sands deposits of Utah are ever brought to the surface will be Washington’s need for strategic oil reserves, and not state economics or environmental concerns.

For now, however, Alberta seems to be doing a fine job of supplying the U.S. with nearly-domestic oil. Currently, Alberta produces between 2-3 million barrels a day, most of which end up in the States. In the next several years this number is expected to increase to 5 million, or enough to potentially supply about ¼ of the United States’ oil requirements. Of course, I am not suggesting that we should ignore the environmental consequences of oil sands mining just because it’s taking place in Canada and not in our own red rock desert.

Thankfully, the oil sands industry is well aware of the environmental problems associated with the mining and refining processes, and are currently working on developing new strategies for reducing impact on the land and minimizing greenhouse emissions. According to McDougall, the goal will be to find a way to convert the waste CO2 into something valuable. Right now, there are some test sites in Alberta where algae is being used to convert the CO2 into a biomass that can then be easily transformed into hydrogen and methane which can, in turn, be used again in the refining process or converted into bio-fuels. McDougall claims that this algae-assisted process could take as much as 100 million tons out of Canada’s CO2 production. While this is not a perfect solution (the sheer area needed for the shallow algae ponds makes it unsuitable for use on a very large scale), the technology appears, at least, to be headed in the right direction.

It seems, however, that the bottom line, when it comes to the West’s oil sand deposits, comes in the form of a cost/benefit equation. Clearly, no one wants to see an industrial complex belching CO2 into the blue skies above Canyonlands, or a strip mine digging up the red earth of Grand Staircase-Escalante, but I doubt that there is a single Utahn who would be opposed to reducing the U.S. dependence on foreign oil. But are oil sands really the answer? According to Professor Smith, there’s a saying in the industry that “oil shale is the energy source of the future, and always will be.” Though after listening to John McDougall’s earnest description of the steps the oil sands industry is taking to develop an integrated system that might eventually be only minimally damaging to the environment, I must admit that I am, like Stephen Bloch, not “categorically opposed to tar sands or shale development.” In the right time, the right way, and the right place, this might be a resource we can tap—as long as we can do it conscientiously, with regard for landscapes we simply cannot stand to lose…even in the name of National Security.
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