Here's the latest idea.... Build nuclear power plants to produce steam to soften the tar sands in Canada. Once we have produced these nuclear steam plants, the energy would be used to soften the tar sands, so that they can be collected and used to make... Gasoline! Cause cars need gas, they can't run on electricity.... or can they?

Here's the skinny on it... The oil companies want to build 20 600MW nuclear power stations to produce the electricity and steam required to develop the tar sands into full production. That is 3 million barrels a day of tar, not oil. This is important, because the tar needs to be "upgraded" to produce fuels from it. It's a process that requires hydrogen. The hydrogen would come from natural gas. This process produces between 3 and 4 cubic feet of hydrogen for every cubic foot of natural gas. It requires 2200 cubic feet of hydrogen to upgrade one barrel of oil. That's more than 600 cubic feet of natural gas. On top of that, the resulting oil would have to be distilled into fuels. It takes about 85 cubic feet natural gas to do that.

Let's look at these numbers. I'll calculate what is required for one day of production of 3 million barrels of tar to fuel. 3 million barrels would produce almost 60 million gallons of gasoline. It would require 20 nuclear power plants times 600 megawatts, that's 288,000 megawatt hours per day. Add to that 2.1 billion cubic feet of natural gas. This does not include any of the energy used to mine the sands, Such as trucks and excavators and so on. Nor the energy or power that is takes to produce the hydrogen. What if we used the natural gas to make electricity instead? 2.1 billion cubic feet of gas is about 60 million kilograms of methane. One kilogram is equal to 14kWh, so with about 75% efficiency, that works out to an additional 630,000 megawatt hours of power. Can that be right? I double checked the numbers. That's over 900,000 megawatt hours of potential power going into making 60 million gallons of gas. What if that power went to driving a fleet of Nissan Leafs? that would be enough to drive 3.6 billion miles. A fleet of Tesla Roadsters would be closer to 5 billion miles.

Now lets look at the gasoline numbers.... 60 million gallons of gas times the average mileage in the U.S. of 27.5 mpg. works out to 1.65 billion miles!?  This is ludicrous. Why, why, why... on top of that, the mining would destroy the Boreal forest and muskeg. The muskeg is sort of like a peat bog and can be 100 feet deep. It is characterized by it's slow decomposition. If these are disturbed the sudden increase in decompositions rates would mean an increase of methane into the atmosphere. Methane is 19 time more potent that carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.  It would mean diverting rivers for the mining process. It would require twice as much as the city of Calgary uses. Every gallon of oil requires 2 to 4.5 gallons of water to produce. The net result is wholesale destruction of huge areas of Canada, for some gasoline... some gasoline that would only take us half as far as the energy used to make it.