Grain of salt needed when reading about grains of oil sand.
Mr Rabin works for CANADIAN imperial bank of commerce World Markets (investments). He gets lots of RA RA prospectuses from people wanting to make lots of money developing the oil sands. He is repeating the RA RA to get investors in giving him money. Any potential problems are buried in the fine print.
It takes the equivalent natural gas of 1 gallon of oil to make 1 gallon of oil in the tar sands. As tar sands oil production ramps up it uses more of the natural gas. (Why do you think natural gas prices have gone up so much this year)? To produce the equivalent oil of Saudi Arabia would need all the natural gas in north America. Which means people will freeze in winter..... Which means governments will have to intervene.....
There are new techniques being developed that do not use natural gas. I know of only 1 plant being built using atomised tar for heating so far.
Getting oil from the tar sands is not a simple matter of sticking a pipe into the ground and pumping the oil away. Great big seperation plants have to be built. The tar sands have to be trucked to the plant. Processed sand have to be trucked away. Pipelines have to be constructed to take the oil to market. I do not see enough plants to do this on a scale of oil production of Saudi Arabia can be on stream by 2010 (that is only 4 years away). 2015 perhaps.
Well, I guess Mr Rabin can be as optimistic about Canada producing as much oil as Saudi Arabia in 2010 as LRI is about releasing the Proton last summer.