In message SMS
was claimed to have wrote:

On 19/08/10 9:19 AM, DevilsPGD wrote:
In RoddNSue
was claimed to have wrote:

The international campaign to disourage travellers from visiting
Alberta Canada is now advising potential tourists in London England.

Pictures of the terrible situation at the Alberta oilsands are but
part of the foul picture.

Speaking as a native Albertan, I can assure you that us Albertans would
rather have the oil sands than tourist dollars from idiots whining about
fossil fuels while supporting us with your dollars.

Free clue: if you're not a fossil fuel consumer, you're not going to be
a tourist anyway.

Seriously, where would you like to get the oil? From the middle east?
Maybe of the Gulf of Mexico? Tanker it in from Alaska?

Alberta is a great place to visit. Banff, Jasper, and of course the
Royal Tyrrell Museum near Drumheller.

Yup.

Never been to Edmonton, as I could care less about the largest mall in
North America.

You could?

Personally, I couldn't care less about it.

Still, extracting oil from the oil sands has got to be the most insane
way to obtain low quality oil at tremendous costs both for the fuel
itself, and for the environment.

I'll see your oil sands and raise you one Gulf of Mexico.

If the producer nations of high quality
crude would come to their senses, and do what's best for their own long
term economic interests, oil would be priced at a level where the oil
sands would be abandoned, around $50 a barrel.

How would that make sense?

At $50/barrel consumption would increase, driving processing costs up
significantly which would result in significant investment in refineries
being needed, costing a lot of short-term revenue to build the
refineries now while simultaneously burning through their long-term
revenue generator.

Those with the ability to produce cheap oil are better off selling at
$80-$150/barrel and pocketing the difference without really caring about
the oil sands with their much higher production and processing overhead.

The biggest long-term threat to the large scale oil producers isn't
other oil, but rather, an alternative becoming cheaper (and worse, a
sustainable one)

Consider what would happen to oil if tomorrow someone announced a cheap,
sustainable/low-environmental-impact, high-capacity high-energy-density
(low weight:energy and size:energy ratio) battery; suddenly
inconsistently available solar, wave and wind farms could provide steady
reliable power. Not only could they do so to homes but also for cars
and trucks and Things That Go.

Sure, it would take a good long while for the world to change over to a
new energy source, but if we found a method of storing and transporting
energy with the energy density of fossil fuels the energy source
wouldn't matter and whatever was the cheapest source of the day would
rule. In other words, fossil fuels would end up directly competing with
every other energy source.

Short of a breakthrough, the demand for oil will never disappear so
there is little need to charge less than the market will support. As
supplies run low, the demand will increase and prices will to match,
oilsands (along with other more difficult to collect sources) will
become more economical with oil eventually becoming so expensive that
few can afford to use it and no one can afford to waste it, making
alternatives practical.

In the short term though, there is little value in selling below what
the market will support, at best you'll just delay the competition
oilsands brings and at a far higher cost than a bit of extra
competition.