Combing oil from tar sands; process improvements have brought the cost of syncrude down to about $10-12/bbl--about one third of what it cost 20 years ago. (Newsfront).

Iraq's recent decision to temporarily stop exporting petroleum, and political upheaval in Venezuela, have once again illustrated the fragility of the world's oil supply and lent new urgency to cries for increased U.S. production to reduce dependence on foreign oil--a priority of President Bush's energy policy. Yet, the energy bill passed by the U.S. Senate last month will do little to achieve that.

In terms of increasing oil production, the bill basically calls for more timely action on oil and gas leases and applications for drilling permits, and for an evaluation of fiscal policies, with a view toward maximizing oil and gas recovery. An energy bill passed by the House of Representatives last year has similar provisions, plus a proposal to drill for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). However, a motion to include a similar proposal in the Senate bill was soundly defeated last month, which dims the chances that it will be part of a final bill.

In any case, ANWR would supply less than six months of the U.S.'s current oil needs, says John Adams, president of Natural Resources Defense Council (Washington, D.C.; nrdc.org). He cites U.S. Geological Survey figures that indicate ANWR has about 3.2 billion barrels of economically recoverable oil.

Absent from both bills is any provision to exploit the country's vast unconventional petroleum resources, particularly oil shale and oil sands. And, the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE; Washington, D.C.) says it has "no activity" in those areas. "DOE has essentially overlooked the fact that we have about 80 billion bbl of petroleum in known deposits of oil sands and considerably more than that in oil shale," says David Olsen, director of the International Centre for Heavy Hydrocarbons (Tulsa, Okla.; oildrop.org), formerly the United Nations Centre for Heavy Crude and Tar Sands.

In contrast, Canada is aggressively moving ahead with plans to increase production from Alberta oil sands. Projects now under way will increase production from an average of 645,000 bbl/d in 2001 to 1.7-2 million bbl/d by 2010, according to the Alberta Dept. of Energy (Edmonton; enr.gov.ab.ca). The …