Free Republic

Junk your SUV and buy an electric scooter. Recent claims by various OPEC leaders that the world has plenty of oil left are bunk, alleges Sadad Al-Husseini, a former top executive at Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company. Oil-producing countries are inflating the size of their oil reserves by as much as 300 billion barrels by padding supposedly proven reserves with “probable” reserves and tar and oil sands, according to Husseini. Such hypothetical reserves are “not delineated, not accessible and not available for production,” Husseini said at a recent energy conference in London. Oil production has now reached its...

EDMONTON - TransCanada Corp. alone plans to ship more than one million barrels a day of oilsands production to the United States with an expanded pipeline construction program unveiled today. The Alberta oil and gas delivery mainstay added a second leg to its new Keystone export service that would more than double the system's capacity and extend it to the Texas coast of the Gulf of Mexico. TransCanada president Hal Kvisle said the added route is a companion instead of competition for projects underway by Enbridge Inc., which is also advancing more than one million barrels daily in new oilsands...

In the unfortunate argument about peak oil supply, what constitutes "oil" is usually poorly defined. Canada's vast bitumen deposits, mostly located in northern Alberta, offer insight into the difficulty of determining what oil is, defining proved reserves, and peak production. There is little agreement on how this bitumen should be classified. Many folks do it the way World Oil does: with explanations and footnotes. One of our reasons for not classifying bitumen the same as conventional proved reserves is the fact that it presently relies on large amounts of natural gas and water for extraction and processing, as well as...

With $80 billion of projects under way or in the planning stages, industry participants forecast that production from the oil-sands region will nearly triple to 2.7 million barrels a day by 2015 from one million barrels a day last year. The U.S. consumes about 21 million barrels of oil a day.