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Oil is not running out. You heard it from Mark Jaccard first. In his new book, Sustainable Fossil Fuels, Jaccard, a professor in the school of resource and environmental management at Simon Fraser University, explains why there's no need to worry about our dependency on non-renewable energy. He believes oil, natural gas and coal will fuel the global energy system for decades to come--and in ways that don't pollute. Jaccard recently spoke with Canadian Business contributor Michelle Magnan in Calgary.
Canadian Business: One of the major premises of your book is that we're not running out of oil. Isn't that opposed to what most people expect?
Mark Jaccard: Most of the studies that say we're running out of oil actually refer only to conventional oil, the oil that we get from the natural pressure in a reservoir. It's fairly easy to extract. But of course, there are different kinds of oil. There's unconventional oil, like the oilsands in Alberta or heavy oil in Venezuela. There are other ways of making the hydrocarbon fuels, like gasoline and diesel, that we make from oil. We can make it from oil shale, from coal. In fact, today in South Africa, people are making 30% to 40% of their transportation fuels from coal. The world has huge resources of coal, very large resources of unconventional oil and, even perhaps still, a considerable amount of conventional oil. This holds true also for natural gas.
CB: But is it economical?
MJ: While we may end up in periods of really tight markets, as we are today, where the price of oil might go very high, you have to be careful to extrapolate or project that into the indefinite future and say that 20 years from now the price of oil will be $200 a barrel. When we look at the underlying costs for producing energy from unconventional oil and unconventional natural gas and coal, we see that new investments can be profitable when the oil price is over $40 a barrel.
CB: You don't agree with people who say we're running out of oil, but you do side with people concerned about the environment.
MJ: Now the real focus in the global community is on carbon dioxide, which is the primary greenhouse-gas emission. And in this case, I do agree with the people that say that we need to act now and we need some sign of strong policies to bring that forward. But usually, the kind of message out there is that the solution is to stop using fossil fuels.
CB: How do you marry the concepts of using fossil fuels and protecting the environment?
MJ: [In my research] I've found that there are technologies that would allow us to use fossil fuels without sending carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, that would allow us to convert fossil fuels into clean forms of secondary energy--like electricity, hydrogen, hot water--for use in our factories, homes and vehicles. Those clean forms of secondary energy can be produced from fossil fuels in processes that would capture the undesired products that we don't want to go into the atmosphere.
CB: What are some examples of the technology?
MJ: I'll focus on carbon dioxide. We can capture it, we can ship it by pipeline, and we can inject it into sedimentary layers in the earth's crust, which is where the carbon came from in the first place. What is also surprising is that it involves, almost entirely, technologies that have been in commercial operation for decades. Let me use coal-to-electricity as an example. You could gasify coal--that's subjecting coal to high-temperature doses of steam--which would create a synthesis gas. That's the main process that South Africans have been using for decades. In doing that, you create this gas that's part hydrogen, part carbon dioxide and other elements, and you can stream off the pure hydrogen from that process. Then you've got a stream of carbon dioxide that you can produce from this.
CB: What do you do with the other products generated from that process, like hydrogen?
MJ: You would pump that hydrogen around to cities and homes for people to use in fuel cells or to combust directly. You can also, right at the coal plant, burn the hydrogen in order to make electricity. The emissions that would come out of the plant would be the water that is the byproduct of burning the hydrogen.
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