Heavy Crude Oil - Environmental Impact

Environmental Impact

With current production and transportation methods, heavy crudes have a more severe environmental impact than light ones. With more difficult production comes the employment of a variety of enhanced oil recovery techniques, including steam flooding and tighter well spacing, often as close as one well per acre. Heavy crudes also carry contaminants. For example, Orinoco extra heavy oil contains 4.5% sulfur as well as vanadium and nickel. However, because crude oil is refined before use, generating specific alkanes via cracking and fractional distillation, this comparison is not valid in a practical sense. Heavy crude refining techniques may require more energy input though, so its environmental impact is presently much more significant than that of lighter crude.

With present technology, the extraction and refining of heavy oils and oil sands generates as much as three times the total CO₂ emissions compared to conventional oil, primarily driven by the extra energy consumption of the extraction process (which may include burning natural gas to heat and pressurize the reservoir to stimulate flow). Current research in to better production methods seek to reduce this environmental impact.

In a 2009 report, the National Toxics Network, citing data provided by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center of the government of the United States and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), found that heavy oils can have higher CO₂ emissions per ton than coal. Emissions were lower than coal on a "per unit of energy produced" basis, at about 84% of those for coal (0.078/0.093) and thus higher on this basis of CO₂ emissions, than conventional oil.

Environmental Research Web has reported that "because of the energy needed for extraction and processing, petroleum from Canadian oil tar sands has higher life cycle emission" versus conventional fossil fuels; "up to 25% more."