Quote:
Originally Posted by ganbaru
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Because tar sand is a terrible waste of energy and resources. It causes more environmental damage than "traditional" crude oil because the process for extracting and refining it requires tremendous resources and energy for what you end up with. That's assuming that nothing goes wrong of course, like a spill. There's of course the human costs too, both in jobs and health. The real kicker is that you need fresh water to refine the sand. The world may be mostly water, but fresh water is in much shorter supply and burdened with increasing demand. There are already problems with fresh water shortages around the world because our socioeconomic systems barely give our resources time to rest and rebuild.
It's likely people who support such a thing have either never heard of the concept of NEG (net energy gain), or EROI (Energy return on investment) or they simply do not care. My bet is on the latter.
Drill baby, drill.