Um, graphite makes a good lubricant as can waxes. Oil, whether synthetic or petroleum based is the most useful, ATM.
Graphite. Not that common. Find billions of tons or barrels of graphite that vehciles around the world can use. Size matters here. A few million is not a few billion.
The oil is not going to last forever and there is no viable substitute on the horizon. That doesn't mean one won't be found, but right now, there is nothing to replace oil and everything it does for us. It is not radioactive, it has a long shelf life, it is not volatile, it transports easily, it is extremely energy intensive. We should have an oil god.
One gallon of gas is about 3 weeks work for one person. One gallon of gas can move a one ton vehicle about 30 miles.
Of course the tailingsare dirty,thats what were doing,cleaning them up for the first time ever and lots of the water used in the extraction is reclaimed water from the tailings ponds,most of the rest of it comes from underground and is unuesable for anything else,thats why lots of wells drilled are for brackish water and not oil or gas,it's then piped to whatever facility needs it for extraction or when injection is used.
And the oil produced is far from low grade oil.Dont know where you got that from.
Define lots of water. The tar sands are harsh on the environment.
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According to Wiki at this URL:
Oil sands - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Transportation and refining
The
heavy crude oil or crude
bitumen extracted from oil sands is a
viscous, solid or semisolid form that does not easily flow at normal
oil pipeline temperatures, making it difficult to transport to market and expensive to process into gasoline, diesel fuel, and other products. Despite the difficulty and cost, oil sands are now being mined by energy companies on a vast scale to extract the bitumen, which is then converted into
synthetic oil (syncrude) by bitumen upgraders, or refined directly into
petroleum products by specialized
refineries.
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