Understanding the Canadian oil sands industry’s greenhouse gas emissions
By Alex D Charpentier, J. Bergerson, H. Maclean. 2009
213 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The magnitude of Canada’s oil sands reserves, their rapidly expanding and energy intensive production, combined with existing and upcoming greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions regulations motivate an evaluation of oil sands-derived fuel production from a life cycle perspective. Thirteen studies of GHG emissions associated with oil sands operations are reviewed. The production of synthetic crude oil (SCO) through surface mining and upgrading (SM&Up) or in situ and upgrading (IS&Up) processes is reported to result in emissions ranging from 62 to 164 and 99 to 176 kgCO2eq/bbl SCO, respectively (or 9.2–26.5 and 16.2–28.7 gCO2eq MJ−1 SCO, respectively), compared to 27–58 kgCO2eq/bbl (4.5–9.6 gCO2eq MJ−1) of crude for conventional oil production. The difference in emissions intensity between SCO and conventional crude production is primarily due to higher energy requirements for extracting bitumen and upgrading it into SCO. On a ‘well-to-wheel’ basis, GHG emissions associated with producing reformulated gasoline from oil sands with current SM&Up, IS&Up, and in situ (without upgrading) technologies are 260–320, 320–350, and 270–340 gCO2eq km−1, respectively, compared to 250–280 gCO2eq km−1 for production from conventional oil. Some variation between studies is expected due to differences in methods, technologies studied, and operating choices. However, the magnitude of the differences presented suggests that a consensus on the characterization of life cycle emissions of the oil sands industry has yet to be reached in the public literature. Recommendations are given for future studies for informing industry and government decision making.
Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7dac80e9697afc2ecd2f47640241fe7faba2908e
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In Environmental Engineering
- Felix Creutzig
- Gunnar Luderer
- Ottmar Edenhofer
- Elmar Kriegler
- Nico Bauer
- J. Minx
- G. P. Peters
- Manfred Lenzen
In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
- Felix Creutzig
- Ottmar Edenhofer
- Gunnar Luderer
- Elmar Kriegler
- Nico Bauer
- Lavinia Baumstark
- I. Mouratiadou
- Robert J. Brecha
Citations in the corpus
- Economic and environmental analysis of a Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) facility for oil recovery from Canadian oil sands (2015, background): “suggest, ‘‘the nature of the data used for the analysis varies significantly from theoretical literature values to project-specific material and energy balances’’ [14].”
- Global fossil energy markets and climate change mitigation – an analysis with REMIND (2012, background): “For non-conventional oil the carbon intensity increases with decreasing fuel quality and lower energy return on energy invested (Brandt 2009; Charpentier et al. 2009).”
- Climate policies for road transport revisited (I): Evaluation of the current framework (2011, background): “On average, these fuels are more energy and carbon intensive than oil, caused by upstream emissions in the supply chain (Charpentier et al., 2009).”