Living a few hundred kilometers from the Oilsands you hear a lot more about what's happening in the area. There has been billions worth of investment in the area over the last 5 years or so. Lots of money being spent by the Provincial government to reduce emissions with carbon capture and sequestration (Stupid idea anyway) and clean-up projects planned to make it 'green' so the US will still want our Oil. I doubt Obama will say no to such a close and reliable source. If the price stays surpressed long enough it just may not be viable, although a few large producers have costs down to ~$30 a barrel, so we'll see. I don't buy this whole 'we're causing global warming' bullshit anyway...
Not gonna happen. The US gets its cheapest oil via pipelines from Canada. There is no way it's gonna suddenly stop this source of cheap oil, and then pay double to get it shipped from Saudi Arabia by ship. Obama has to say this to please his environmental supporters. Or, he really is a fool and WILL block oilsands imports.
The UN would kick America out and Canadians would have Russian, Chinese and Europen support overnight. UN!! LOL.LOL.LOL. Europeans!! LOL.LOL.LOL.
Obama suffers from loose lips syndrome the most in liberal areas. On a San Francisco radio talk show he talked about using environmental lawsuits to bankrupt coal companies. Environuts kept us from having nuclear energy so we went to coal. Coal spews lots of radioactive dust into the atmo along with mercury and is the reason we can't eat fish. Then they want to fix that by blocking coal usage and oil as well. With no coal, oil, or nuclear we have natural gas but it will run out eventually. What the environmental wackos really want is us with no energy at all, that is what we have to be aware of when they speak. Without energy we are powerless to harm nature so that is the goal, us powerless. I have no clue how much BO is going to really go in that direction though, probably not far at all, his whole, entire, cabinet has Wall Street backgrounds folks !! That's why I don't get too worried about the trading taxes or anything related to Wall Street...
Totally false, and wrong again my friend. Barack Obama has never appeared in a San Francisco radio talk show. Obama gave an interview to the San Francisco Chronicle in January of 2008; about 1 year into his Presidential campaign. But no appearance on any radio talk shows in the San Francisco Bay Area.
True. But what this thread has failed to touch upon is the fact that there are two different methods of extracting bitumen, and each one has different costs. "1. Mining - Large areas of land are cleared of trees and brush, then the top soil and clay are removed to expose the oil sand. This surface mining method uses large trucks and shovels to remove the sand, which can have a volume of anywhere from 1-20% of actual bitumen. After processing and upgrading, the end result is sent to refineries, where it's made into gasoline, jet fuel and other petroleum products. 2. In situ - This relatively new method is mainly used to get bitumen in oil sand that is buried too deep below the earth's surface to be recovered with a truck and shovel. In situ technology injects steam deep beneath the earth to separate the viscous bitumen from the sand and pump it up to the surface. The bitumen then goes through the same upgrading process as it would in the mining method. 1. The mining method is considered to be very damaging to the environment, as it involves leveling hundreds of square miles of land, trees and wildlife. Oil companies using this method are required to return the area to its original environmental condition once the mining is completed, adding further to costs. 2. The in situ method is more costly than the mining method, but it's much less damaging to the environment, requiring only a few hundred meters of land and a nearby water source to operate. It's estimated by the Alberta government that 70-80% of oil in the oil sands is buried too deep for open pit mining; therefore, in situ methods will likely be the future of extracting oil from oil sands. The most common form of in situ is called Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD)."