How long will the Alberta Tar Sands last for?

[Ashley]

I am doing a project on the Tar sands in Alberta, but there seems to be no information about how long it will last. It will really help, thank you.

[Tor]

It goes down deep, there's a lot of it, there's also a lot more still undiscovered in the north.

[BadMoonRising]

Assuming that Oilsands production tops out at about 5 Million barrels per day due to overdevelopment/sustainability concerns, that is about 1.8 Billion barrels per year and assuming Reserves of about 300 Billion Barrels of economically recoverable oilsands and insitu oil, that would place the Reserve Life Index at about 166 years or until about the year 2179. The world will not be using oil as the primary driver of the Global economy beyond about 2060 at the very most. The price of extraction of oil will become prohibitively expensive in comparison to alternative energies and the oil era will be over, long before the oilsands are depleted. Oilsands oil will continue to produce, but will be a smaller and smaller fraction of the energy mix beyond 2060. (in truth I believe the actual date to be 2045).

I do not know where the 3 Trillion barrel estimates quoted in Shawn's link come from, I suspect that they conflate In Place Resource with Economic Reserves. The generally accepted Reserve number is about 300-500 Billion barrels of economic reserves in "oilsands" oil. SAGD will not recover all of "oil in place" and although it is efficient in the 10-50% range, in most oil reservoirs it is ineffective as a recovery mechanism due to stratification or layering by thermal insulators.

It is not now, nor will it EVER be in the future, about the amount of oil. It is about the global economy being able to afford the costa of its energy supply. The cost of oil will terminate the oil era, long before Reserves run out (more properly stated before resource runs out).

EDIT: I have linked to the most credible Reserve Estimate for 2012 (The Alberta ERCB) that is possible. The established total oil reserves are 170.2 Billion Barrels which given my above assumptions places the Reserve life Index at 93.3 years or 2106.