Natural gas fracking will kill the need for oilsands.

Why? oil and gas are 2 separate energy sources?

They've been rebranded from tar to oil but if they're called the perfumed sands tomorrow that's not going to make any difference to the issues involved. I'm surprised you think the marketing term is important.

People in BC apparently don't like pipelines, so unless they start fracking right in downtown Vancouver, that's not going to be any good to them either.

They are no more tar than they are oil. The deposits are bitumen. The bitumen is then upgraded to make synthetic crude oil.

Are they still dumping, er, stockpiling the vast amounts of petcoke generated during upgrading? I haven't looked at that issue for several years but it was bleedin' obvious when I did that the crap was being landfilled.

That rebranding as you put it happened a long time ago.

I worked for Shell Canada in exploration and production from 1966 to 1971 and during that time it was never referred to as tar sands. At that time the more common phrase was heavy oil but oil sand was also used.

This was long before any actual commercial production was viable and extremely few outside the oil industry knew it even existed so it wasn't as you call it a "marketing term" it was just what it was called.

So I would suggest if there has been any rebranding recently, it would be by the environmentalists for their purposes.

I genuinely have no idea. But everything that is done up here is done under the rules of the environmental regulators. It is as far from a toxic maverick free-for-all as you could possibly imagine.

The oil sands guys generate millions of tonnes of the stuff every year. Some is burned as a refinery fuel. Some is used in earthworks. A bit is exported. Most is stockpiled/landfilled. If you are generating more of the stuff that you can ever use or sell, it's landfilling, plain and simple. And the stuff is loaded with sulphur (7% in the case of Suncor, which generates way more of it than anyone else).

I'm sure we've had this conversation before.

If anything the reverse is true. Fracking provides low cost gas to assist in the separation process.

Transfering a low cost abundant energy source into an expensive scarce energy spource makes economic sense whatever the EROI. Even the sage of Victoria says the oil sands carbon emissions are neither here nor there in terms of any global climate change.

Does it? I can't see why.

I've got to say this is a pointless debate, none of us are in a position to do anything about it one way or the other. It's obvious that Alberta is hinging their revenue sources in the future on the oilsands and whatever people say about not liking them, they like PST and income taxes going up even less (and that would be federally too, given how much tax revenue comes from Alberta).

The only thing that will stop it is a drop in the price of oil.

Is it beyond the abilities of mankind to use natural gas instead of petroleum?

I'm fully aware that such things take time and money but there is time and there is certainly money. Why waste money using an abundant low-cost energy source to produce an expensive scarce one?

I'm no tree-hugger.

I am always saddened to hear this. People can vote out politicians that support it and vote in politicians that wish us to return to living by using our own muscles for transportation, lighting and working. Simple really.