The article argues that the hardest heavy oils are becoming strategically important not because they are new, but because the energy industry can no longer afford to design around them. For decades, systems were optimized for cleaner, predictable feedstocks, leaving unstable, contaminated, and chemically complex oils undervalued and excluded.
That approach is breaking down under today’s constraints. Carbon intensity targets, hydrogen availability, capital discipline, and infrastructure limitations are narrowing the range of viable solutions. Incremental improvements on already clean barrels now deliver diminishing returns.
The article highlights that many renewable and biogenic oils introduce the same challenges long associated with difficult heavy oils, including high oxygen and water content, instability, acidity, and coke formation. This convergence collapses the traditional distinction between fossil and renewable feedstocks from a processing standpoint.
What has changed is not the feedstocks themselves, but the emergence of catalytic approaches capable of operating directly in environments where water, oxygen, sulphur, and instability coexist. Technologies that can function under these conditions are no longer niche. They become broadly applicable across both fossil and renewable pathways.
The core conclusion is counterintuitive but clear: the path to cleaner fuels increasingly runs through the most difficult feedstocks. The barrels once avoided now define the limits of current systems and, in doing so, point toward the solutions that can scale under real-world constraints.
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