14 DAY TRIAL // A new report published by experts at the Rice University Baker Institute for Public Policy suggests that one of the few paths the United States can take to reduce its dependency on foreign oil is to turn its eyes on North American, specifically Canada. New policies and legislation are therefore required.
According to the document, the US must work towards having crude extracted from Canadian oil sands diverted through Gulf Coast refineries. This is the only feasible way to ensure that the country's energetic security is not jeopardized.
Canada holds the largest reserves of natural bitumen, estimated at 176.8 billion barrels, followed by Kazakhstan and Russia. The issue with extracting crude from these reserves is that the methods used are extremely damaging to the environment.
By increasing trade with its northern neighbor, the US will also reduce its trade deficit, which will contribute to improving its economy. The report suggests that the extra carbon dioxide that will result from this could be offset switching gas for coal in electricity generation.
The work was authored by the Rice Peterkin professor of political economy, Dagobert Brito, and colleague Robert Curl, the Pitzer-Schlumberger professor emeritus of natural sciences and professor emeritus of chemistry at the university.
“The market for petroleum is global. Canada will produce oil from the sands regardless of any U.S. policies. It is less expensive for Canada to use U.S. Gulf ports to market their oil,” the authors say.
“This oil will create jobs in the U.S. petrochemical industry and would be a secure source of oil for the United States were world oil markets to be disrupted,” they add. Additionally, the team estimates that more than 50 percent of the money made by Canada from selling oil would be spent in the US.
The researchers say that replacing coal with natural gas – extracted from recently discovered reserves in the US – would contribute to offsetting the increased CO2 emissions from Canadian oil sand fields. This does not mean that Canada will pollute less, but that the US will.
“The present glut in the gas market is a golden opportunity to push this change by adding a limit in terms of metric tons of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour through adding carbon dioxide to the pollutant list for electricity generation plants, and gradually tightening it,” the Rice team explains.
Statistics provided by the US Energy Information Administration suggest that the country has 2,100 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas, enough for about 90 years of consumption at current rates, Science Blog reports.