Oil sands get vote of confidence from China

One more nail in the coffin of planet earth, tho I understand that people who live there need to have jobs and eat.

Extraction of oil sands petroleum takes an enormous anount of energy in itself, let slone the environmental damage done to the landscape as much of the process involves strip mining. In addition oil sands (basically tar) needs solvents added to transport as a liquid which must be extracted and dealt with at the other end.

Canadian oil sands, like most, are so heavy in sulphur and heavy metals (not the music!) content most of what the US buys isn't used as fuel in cars because most refineries can't convert it so we use it to pave roads and fuel some power plants, which must be strictly monitored so the emissions of said pollutants are safe. That's the really dangerous thing here and why I posted this, China can be expected to do as they always do, just burn away with no regulations at all- and alot of these environmental crimes they commit have global repercussions.

Honestly the near 5,000 soldiers that died invading and securing Iraq and their oilfields of light sweet crude will  be a drop in the barrel compared to how many people will end up with shortened life spans and birth defects from the pollutants from China's use of 3 billion barrels of oil  sands. Light sweet crude is clean and requires little refinement, in fact only one grade of oil historically is better- west texas intermediate- though that's pretty rare now.

But as I said, ya gotta put food on the table.

(I might add that may have been  why we weren't so interested in competing with them over this. We've got interests drilling in Iraq where the lift cost is just 50 cents a barrel and refining it is cheap. If we need to drop a few grades and deal with expensive extraction and lengthy refining processes, we have our own ghetto petroleum-(no offense)- oil shale, in the Bakken play which stretches from the Dakotas into Montana and even a bit into Canada. When gas hits $4 it will become financially viable again) Extraction methods involving drilling sideways and shattering rock formations are being developed, but as in oil sands there is a cost- not energy in this case but water and there is not usually a surplus in the area.