Great idea and just what we need to eliminate foreign price gougers from the marketplace.

Even so, Candian oil sands 1.8 trillion barrels of it can't be written off so easily and may have a technological fix of their own to apply and would look like MSR and thorium to provide quite massive heat at the very lowest point of their reserve, to liquify the semi-solid resource.

And perhaps could use some variation of this previously trialled technology, where we here in Oz, did something similar to get sweet light crude out of the well and straight into diesel engine fuel tanks.

Our solvent, (methanol) used to dissolve a soluble wax content, worked quite well as did a simple pre-filter cyclone to remove the sand content.

And 4.75% methanol, improved it as ready to use unrefined diesel.

Suggest your reported method be trialled in Canada to ensure the North American market no longer needs to rely on the middle east, Russia or Asia, continually fluctuating prices and rampant price gouging as standard practice.

Moreover, If we can also eliminate the profit demanding paper shuffling middleman from our energy market, the economy will quite massively prosper for their exclusion.

I like the idea of the producer selling directly to the refiner and thus eliminating those who try with their deep pockets, derivatives and short selling etc

. Accumulate wealth others and their enterprise earns for them. It takes little skill or intelligence to buy the product of someone else's endeavour and innovation.

Then re-market it for a price gouged profit. And we've allowed far too much of this BS already and the economies of the west the worse for it. and very nearly crippled in some cases, as in the USA? Almost unrepayable debt burdens. That can't be ameliorated with chapter 11 strategies!
Alan B.

We have very large reserves of shale oil, which should be harvested using this or other developments in the harvesting of such oil. Some of our deep deposits of shale oil suitable for fracking rival those in the US, & we have lots of surface stuff as well.

The ridiculous thing is allowing our oil refining industries to be shut down at a time when harvesting alternate oil deposits is looking more positive every day.

Time for a law requiring any company wishing to sell fuel in Australia to either refine it here themselves, or have it done for them in a local refinery.

We don't hear too much from the peak oil folk these days. I wonder why?

Err Mhaze peak crude oil did occur in Nov/Dec 2005.
When the price of US$147 a barrel crashed the economy in 2008 it gave
the opportunity to fracking of tight oil.
This has given us all a break to bring in alternative sources of energy.
The tight oil industry has been likened to a Ponzi scheme.
So far it has been financed by Wall St and the payment of debt by
selling leases to smaller incoming companies.
Notice that last month BHP sold off its tight oil leases.
It is very susceptible to interest rate rises as a significant rise
from the present low rate could wipe out the industry.
This article shows something new that might be a goer.