Those who are pushing the inclusion of indirect land use change (ILUC) in government regulations have thus far proposed ILUC as the only indirect effect and that it only apply to biofuels. A letter from more than 100 scientists pointed out this would create unequal boundaries for transportation fuels and unfairly disadvantage biofuels.
But are there indirect effects from producing gasoline? In a March 16 hearing, staff for the California Air Resources Board said they looked but couldn’t find any. Maybe they should subscribe to National Geographic Magazine. In the cover story of their March issue, they take a look at the oil produced from the Canadian Oil Sands. This paragraph gives you a good synopsis:
Nowhere on Earth is more earth being moved these days than in the Athabasca Valley. To extract each barrel of oil from a surface mine, the industry must first cut down the forest, then remove an average of two tons of peat and dirt that lie above the oil sands layer, then two tons of the sand itself. It must heat several barrels of water to strip the bitumen from the sand and upgrade it, and afterward it discharges contaminated water into tailings ponds like the one near Mildred Lake. They now cover around 50 square miles.
Only 150 square miles of the oil sands have been mined thus far but the government has leased 1,356 square miles that are minable. According to the article, the U.S. imports more oil from Canadian Oil Sands than any other country. Imports from Canada are about 19 percent of our total oil imports. That number is expected to grow and according to a new paper in the journal Environmental Research Letters, it will contribute to significantly higher greenhouse gas emissions for gasoline.
Why is this important? Well, if you read the latest EIA Outlook, you will see that the U.S. will continue to require increasing amounts of liquid transportation fuels. The report also said that growth in U.S. crude production is “limited after 2010, however, because newer discoveries are smaller, and capital expenditures rise as development moves into deeper waters.” So the two most likely source to meet the increased need are biofuels, which are constantly improving their GHG profile, and oil sands, which are moving in the other direction. Which one do we want?
Filed under: California Air Resources Board, Climate Change, Low Carbon Fuel Standard, Oil prices, biofuel | Tagged: biofuels, California Air Resources Board, carbon debt, Climate Change, corn ethanol, greenhouse gas emissions, indirect land use change, international land use change, Land Use Change, Low Carbon Fuel Standard
I think the oil industry would like us all to overlook land use changes associated with oil production. The oil sands project is a fine example but it is just the latest. A look at the environmental destruction that has accompanied oil production in Ecuador shows some additional land use changes. Because of the possibility of trees falling across pipelines, pipelines generally sit in the middle of a cleared strip. In Ecuador, the pipelines have resulted in a patchwork of pipelines cutting through the rainforest.
In this country, there is said to be around 250,000 miles of oil and gas pipelines. When you consider that we are talking about a strip 100 feet wide and 250,000 miles long, the amount of land that has undergone land use change to accommodate these pipelines is quite large.
So the CARB staff that couldn’t find land use changes associated with oil weren’t looking very hard.
[...] insisted that they looked at the indirect carbon effects of oil but couldn’t find any. In a recent post on this blog, I suggested that they should subscribe to National Geographic Magazine. But that [...]
[...] staff insisted that they looked at the indirect carbon effects of oil but couldn’t find any. In a recent post on this blog, the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) suggested that they should subscribe to [...]
[...] on this blog, I posed this question: Ethanol or Tar Sands? With Canada as the largest supplier of petroleum to America, it was a simple question: do we want [...]