Why not just burn the tar sands in a boiler and ship the electricity, not the crude? Or, for the 25 percent that you can’t recover as liquids, burn that part? I’m sure it’s not that simple (notice the mountains of sulfur that would wind up in the atmosphere, and making acid rain in Toronto). But I bet there’s a point where burning on site makes economic sense.

Think of tar sands as a different kind of coal, not a different kind of oil.