Some time ago I heard that getting oil out of the ground in California required so much pumping that some pumps actually used more energy in electricity than they delivered in crude. Maybe that's why the highest carbon intensity crude was from California itself.

@HarveyD
I was interested in the various values for NA and Venezuelan crudes rather than Saudi light, in view of all the rhetoric being generated by US opponents of tar sands. As you point out other heavy crudes are as bad. The article was not clear on methodology, i.e. how much of the energy input was accounted for (NG use in tar sands, power for pumped wells etc). Sooner we can phase them all out the better, but the SUV driving anti-nuke crowd will delay that as long as possible.

Yes, it would be effective, but who else would supply EU with Oil and more specially with enough NG?

Russia would ship its Oil and NG to Japan, China, South Korea and also to USA (who would gladly and quickly jump on lower price Russian crude, for increased profits for the local refiners and distributors)

Oil, NG and ICEVs are the biggest business the world ever had. Close to 100 million barrels a day + close to the equivalent (or more) in NG/coal and biofuels + 100 million ICEVs/year represent big money and huge profits.

The quest for more and more wealth by the 3% (progressively going to 1%), regardless of the impacts on the environment and our health, is so strong and powerful that they will delay or try to block what Germany and Japan are trying to do.

The strong and powerful can't delay or block what Germany and Japan are trying to do because the tide has already turned. Even the energy giants know this; http://reneweconomy.com.au/2014/germany-decline-of-fossil-fuel-generation-is-irreversible-75224

The strong and powerful can still delay or block what we in North America are trying to do though, but even here renewables are finding allies in some very strange places: Have you heard of the "Green Tea Party/Coalition" ??? They started out as a Koch Brothers funded group. Yeah, those Koch Brothers.

Talk about "romantic fantasies."

http://reneweconomy.com.au/2014/germany-decline-of-fossil-fuel-generation-is-irreversible-75224

German energy giant RWE has taken a massive loss of €2.8 billion – it’s first loss in 60 years – after admitting it got its strategy wrong, and should have focused more on renewable and distributed energy rather than conventional fossil fuels.

RWE, like other major German utilities, has spent much of the past decade fighting against the country’s “energiewende”, the energy transition that is seeing it dump nuclear energy and transform the electricity system of Europe’s biggest manufacturing economy to one dominated by renewables.

Last night, Peter Terium, who has been CEO for less than two years, conceded that the company had got it wrong. He admitted that the change in electricity markets, which has seen earnings from conventional generation gutted by the impact of solar and wind energy, was “unstoppable”. It was now time to change strategy, and focus on what the electricity market will look like in the future.

“I grant that we have made mistakes,” Terium said in a prepared speech to a media conference accompanying his result. “We were late entering into the renewables market – possibly too late.”

Analysts have been pointing this out for years. Indeed, the big three German utilities have accounted for just 7 per cent of the renewable energy installations that now account for more than one quarter of the country’s generation, and which have transformed the market. Most renewable capacity has been installed by home and industrial consumers, and smaller and smarter energy companies.

Instead, RWE ploughed on with coal and gas. Now, Terium says, it is making less and less money from its conventional power stations, and it is closing nearly 7GW of capacity. “This trend will continue in the next few years and it is irreversible,” he says.

Conventional power stations are being driven out by solar PV, particularly during peak load, and the huge expansion of renewables has pushed the market price of electricity to less than €37 per megawatt-hour, where it is virtually impossible to operate conventional power stations economically.

Does THAT sound like it is the Energiewende that is failing?

Conventional power stations are being driven out by solar PV, particularly during peak load, and the huge expansion of renewables has pushed the market price of electricity to less than €37 per megawatt-hour, where it is virtually impossible to operate conventional power stations economically.

And only doing it because the PV receives a massively un-economic feed-in tariff and other legal preferences.  There is no "competition"; the winner was designated by law.  If the "renewables" were paid the market price, they'd be hopelessly uneconomic and be bankrupt immediately.

Does THAT sound like it is the Energiewende that is failing?

If it needs subsidies and mandates, it fails by definition.  Sooner or later you run out of Other People's Money to waste on those things, and your mis-allocation of resources hits you as the debtors default on their repayments.

Union of Concerned Scientists?  A PDF from them isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

Union of Concerned Scientists? A PDF from them isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

"Doug Koplow is the founder of Earth Track, Inc., and has worked on naturalresource subsidy issues for more than 20 years, mainly in the energy sector. He
holds a B.A. in economics from Wesleyan University and an M.B.A. from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration.
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) is the leading science-based nonprofit working for a healthy environment and a safer world. UCS combines independent scientific research and citizen action to develop innovative, practical solutions and to secure responsible changes in government policy, corporate
practices, and consumer choices."

You're right, in no way does that trump the biased opinions of one electrical engineer with a blog.

And that seems to be the basis of your problem with them - they are "anti-nuclear." Would you have any problem with them if they weren't? Would you exalt their virtues if they, like you, condemned renewables?

that seems to be the basis of your problem with them - they are "anti-nuclear."

Quite right.  They are dogmatically against the only source of energy that is carbon-free and we can make more of at will.  This effectively makes them opposed to the survival of perhaps the majority of the species on the planet, possibly including humans.

Would you have any problem with them if they weren't?

I would oppose them if they were explicitly (as opposed to implicitly) pro-fossil fuels, or for any of a great many political positions they could take.

Would you exalt their virtues

Organizations which front for totalitarians have no virtues worth mentioning.  They began as stealth apologists for the Soviet Union, and haven't improved.

if they, like you, condemned renewables?

I don't condemn renewables per se.  I condemn renewables which do not live up to the claims made for them, such as being promoted as solutions to problems they do not in fact solve.  If wind power was matched to loads which inexpensively and efficiently took up the output whenever available and cost-effectively produced things otherwise made with fossil fuels (e.g. electrochemical ammonia), I'd be 100% for it.  That is not how most renewables* are used or represented, and it is the false representation which is the biggest issue.  Leading people to believe that they are solving problems they aren't is destructive; taking their money for it is fraud.

* Consider the claims made for corn ethanol, biodiesel, biomass electricity and such.  These worsen nitrate pollution and siltation in the Gulf, loss of Midwest conservation easements, destruction of tropical rain forests for oil palms, and the clear-cutting of centuries-old forests in Germany, to list just a few.  Ask the orangutans if they'd rather have a palm-oil plantation, or a Fukushima-scale problem 20 miles away.  But be sure to ask them before they're extinct in the wild.