Oilsands production mixed with green enterprise would be more palatable to world markets than the thick black brew triggering North American environmental air raid sirens now. Call it fossil fuel light.
Seven Generations Ltd. calls it the ?third pump? – the one further to the left of regular at your friendly neighbourhood gas station dispensing oilsands fuel extracted with lower carbon technology.
We?ll call it Part 2 in the Revelstoke company?s Insanely Ambitious Big Energy Initiative (IABEI).
Part 1, as Public Offerings readers might recall, involves building an 1,800-mile electrified railway from Canada to Valdez, Alaska (?Fast tracking oilsands delivery? – issue 1148; October 18-24). The bottom line: roughly $20 billion to build an aboveground alternative to distribute Alberta oilsands production into the wider world-energy market via Alaska?s Trans-Alaska oil-shipping infrastructure.
Conservative energy analysts have likely already written the idea off as a drug-induced fantasy.
But the more conventional oilsands pipe dream – the $7 billion Keystone XL variety – is running into its own hard realities in the court of public opinion.
Meanwhile the economics of shipping all of Canada?s oil production south via pipeline to the United States ensure its continued discount status. But more than oilsands delivery options need rethinking. Extraction should also be atop the list.
Current smash-and-grab methods of choice involve either surface mining the oilsands bitumen or steam-assisted gravity drainage – injecting huge volumes of steam into the ground to melt the oilsands, and pretty much everything around the heavy crude oil reserves, into usable liquid. Both require huge amounts of natural gas, which all but erases any overall energy gain in the process.
A renewable power option applied to oilsands extraction could amp up that energy gain.
Seven Generations is on the case.
Having renewable energy roots, its brain trust wants to apply kinder, gentler methods to the oilsands harvest. One involves the use of in-ground electrodes; the other would harness wind turbines.
The latter option might be a stretch, even for Seven Generation?s IABEI. Wind, as has been chronicled in previous Public Offerings, is at best an intermittent supplement to the industrial energy grid. It also requires huge investment in infrastructure to generate relatively little power.
Without taxpayer subsidies, it wouldn?t be a power player at all.
Not surprisingly, it has its critics – some in high places.
For example, according to the British press, the Duke of Edinburgh recently described wind farms as being ?absolutely useless, completely reliant on subsidies and an absolute disgrace.? But that?s not to say they wouldn?t have some application in reducing the carbon footprint in the exploitation of a major North American energy source that will be key to powering the continent?s economic engine.
Greening dirty energy. Building transcontinental rail lines to eliminate environmentally suspect oil pipelines en route to tapping a wider range of energy markets for Canada.These are in the best traditions of nation-building dreams. They might be beyond the capabilities of a small company like Seven Generations, but most big things have humble beginnings, and thinking big is too often something done any place but in Canada.
More business companies like Seven Generations could help change that and build a bigger country in the bargain. ?
