Tar sands are essentially just what they sound like. A thick, sticky goo trapped in rock and sand below the ground. It takes strip mines to get at the goo, called bitumen, which must then be heated with steam and hot water, and then processed with caustic chemicals. It can be an environmental nightmare.
And all that takes a lot of energy, leaving the end product very close to being a net loser of energy, not a producer.
Meanwhile, the nation pins its hopes on hydrogen, which could also be a net energy loser, and some miraculous breakthrough that will make our transition simple. There are some technologies on the horizon that could improve the picture, notably a new process for making oil from garbage, but it remains to be seen whether any of them will work on the kind of scale needed to fuel this very hungry nation.
The most likely scenario is very little will be done. A lot of chatter, but not much action.
"I have a feeling the country is going to continue to pay a very high price before we finally figure it out," Suppes says. "I just hope the price isn't extremely high."
Lee Dye’s column appears weekly on ABCNEWS.com. A former science writer for the Los Angeles Times, he now lives in Juneau, Alaska.
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