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It’s only like adding 20 million cars to the roads, eh? : NRDC
By Alan Septoff
Friday, March 05, 2010
Read this blog post on the originating site
We in the environmental community often say, correctly, that extracting and upgrading a barrel of tar sands oil emits three to five times more greenhouse gases than extracting a barrel of conventional oil. (Conventional oil generally doesn’t need upgrading — that’s part of the reason it’s “conventional”.)
Industry counters that life cycle emissions are what matter, not extraction emissions. And by that measure, tar sands oil is “only” 10% more GHG polluting than conventional oil.
The Natural Resources Defense Council’s Elizabeth Shope responds in part:
This is a poor assessment on several levels. First, while some of the most efficient surface mining methods of extracting tar sands cause lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions 10% greater than conventional oil, many of the in-situ operations—where the ground is heated with steam for several years in order to melt the tar-like oil enough so that it can flow out—cause lifecycle emissions that are 30% greater. Currently, about half of the tar sands production is from mining, and half in-situ; the trend is towards using more in-situ. So on average, tar sands have lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions that are closer to 20% greater than conventional oil; simply reporting the best value (10%) against the worst conventional crude oil emissions is misleading PR—not scientific.
Okay, so 20% still doesn’t sound like so much to you? If you do the math, it turns out that replacing 3 million barrels per day (mbd)* of conventional oil with tar sands oil would cause 120 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year.**
Sounds like a lot? That’s because it is. According to GREET, the average car travelling 12,000 miles per year contributes 5.8 metric tons of global warming pollution to the atmosphere. So adding 120 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year is equivalent to adding over 20 million cars to the road – and that’s a low-end estimate. For some context, this is approximately the number of automobiles in California and over double the number of cars in Texas, which has the second highest number of cars in any U.S. state.
You should really read her full post, including supporting links.
Tagged with: natural resources defense council, greenhouse gases
