The price of gas is going through the roof with no one to blame, but do you know where your gas comes from?

It is hard to remember when you first realized that milk came from cows, but most people know that gas comes from oil. And oil comes from the currently unstable ground we walk on. But which patch of brown earth gives us our energy here in River City?

It turns out that we mostly use some of the most expensive gas, and it is among the most harmful to the world around us. Getting it here is also a cautionary tale.

A minority supply of refined product (grades of gas, jet fuel, fuel oil, etc.) comes to Spokane from Salt Lake City via the ChevronTexaco pipeline. This is, largely, a conventional product that comes from a number of sources in the Gulf Coast area and South America. The majority of our oil products come from Canada and, in particular, the oil sands area of northern Alberta. It goes to Billings, where it is refined and distributed via the Yellowstone Pipeline operated by ConocoPhillips.

Both of these pipelines are decades old and go over our aquifer and under the Spokane River. Oil pipelines are interesting critters and in spite of problems they are fairly low-risk operations.

The oil sands products that we use are about the most expensive to create of all the fossil-based liquid fuels, from both a financial and environmental perspective. The process is so enormous that it is difficult for the mind to grasp it.

It takes 3 to 4 tons of tar/oil sands to produce one barrel of “oil.” This is obtained from huge open-pit mines near or inside the Arctic Circle. In order to get the liquid out of the sand, it must be “cooked,” using 20 to 30 percent of Canada’s natural gas. The result is “floated” out onto water and skimmed off and sent through a pipeline to Billings. That will change soon when the heavy equipment that you have been reading about has been transported through Idaho and Montana to the mine site and used for refining there.

This process also uses major quantities of water, which is scarce in the region. There are about 50 square miles of new “lakes” up there that kill birds that fly into them. National Geographic did an excellent job of explaining all this a while ago.

The gas, jet fuel and heating oil that we use are only “shared” with other populations by truck to those nearby. North Idaho has no access to the Yellowstone Pipeline except by surface transportation from Spokane.

Another interesting part of this whole puzzle is that the Yellowstone Pipeline is not a complete pipeline. Because of a dispute over the use of tribal lands involving a slow leak of thousands of gallons of jet fuel, ConocoPhillips puts the pipeline oil from Billings into tank cars at Missoula. It is then shipped by rail link to Thompson Falls and put back in the pipeline there.

It is hard to say how expensive the oil derivatives are because of subsidies and secrecy, but it is a lead-pipe cinch that any liquid fuels that don’t come out of the ground, like being tapped by a straw, are going to be surprisingly expensive. Some of the shallowest, productive and least expensive oil wells in the world are in Iraq, where a barrel of oil (42 gallons) costs less than $10 to produce.

We pay dearly for our oil products in so many ways. How much longer will we be able to do it, even here?