Quote:
Originally Posted by Fozzie_DeBear
Albertan's need to remember Peter Lougheed's philosophy that we need to turn our non-renewable resource (hydrocarbons) into a renewable resource (a ton of cash in our Heritage Fund, a diversified economy).
The Oil and Gas sector has a best before date, a date when essentially that sector is unprofitable...we need to use innovation to 1) push that date back (by making the oilsands as cheap and clean as we can) and 2) by transforming the capabilities of the current energy sector into non-oil and gas sectors and are profitable.
Personally, I like the idea of taking Alberta's talents in:
-Mega project management
-Drilling
-Understanding in-situ steam and thermal processes
And seeing if we can't make large scale geothermal energy economic
It took 50 years of (haphazard) research to get Oilsands technologies where they needed to be...and a lot of Alberta Government money...money that was VERY well invested, in my opinion (the Energy companies would have taken a looong time to get to SAGD etc on their own).
So to me, Climate Change is a bit of red herring (not that it isn't real..it is)...but in Alberta its a very important economic argument that gets us to the same place...what are we going to do when markets won't buy our oil?
PS This is one of the reasons why the Wildrose fiscal austerity mantra is really dangerous to Alberta...we HAVE to be entrepreneurial and expect our Government to be as well. The Alberta economy of 2060 depends upon Government/Univeristy/Industry projects we need to plan now...
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I agree with everything accept for this. What has been done in the oil sands is very commendable for how clean and efficient they have been able to make it, but IMO it is time to begin the process of moving on. No more subsidies or investments into innovation for the oil industry, that funding needs to be pulled and put into innovating renewable energies ASAP. There is IMO no point to continue giving oil companies the means to continue bringing in top talent to figure out better ways of getting oil out of the ground. If the same type of investment was made in geothermal/solar/nuclear years ago we would probably already be there.
You can't tell me that we can drill straight down thousands of feet, then curve the drill like a straw, shoot high-pressured water to crack the rock and bring the oil to the surface, not to mention doing the same thing in the middle of the ocean, and that solar is not feesible. It's not feesible because the focus has not been on it, when it should have been for many years now.