Oil Sands

The Alberta oil sands are among the largest deposits of petroleum in the world. The Athabasca and Wabasca Bitumen deposits cover some 43 300 km2. There are also major deposits of oil sands along the Peace River in Alberta, and around Cold Lake, which straddles the border between Alberta and Saskatchewan. Together, these oil sands contain more petroleum than Saudi Arabia's oil fields, which are the richest in the world.

It is technically impossible to get any more than a small fraction of this petroleum out of the ground. Bitumen (tar) does not flow, and so it cannot be recovered through a well as can conventional crude oil. Getting any of it at all out of the ground means building a huge and expensive plant usually over the course of several years. Only major petroleum companies can put together the vast sums of money and pools of technical expertise required to undertake such megaprojects.

Great Canadian Oil Sands Limited (GCOS; now known as Suncor) was the first to use the principal recovery technique for removing the oil from the sands, developed by the Alberta Research Council. GCOS started producing synthetic crude oil from bitumen at a plant near Fort McMurray, Alta, in 1967. Syncrude Canada Limited built the second plant to mine the Athabasca oil sands, also near Fort McMurray. In 1979, when it began production, and in every year since, this one plant moves more earth material than all of the rest of the Canadian mining industry.

At these two plants, the earth lying above the oil sands is stripped away, much as in an open-pit coal mine. Enormous machines then dig up the bitumen-soaked sands. The sands are next transported on conveyor belts to a plant for processing. There, they are mixed with hot water or injected with steam and filtered to separate out the bitumen. Next, the bitumen is upgraded chemically on site, by decreasing the ratio of carbon to hydrogen in hydrocarbon molecules of the bitumen. The resulting product is a synthetic light crude oil.

The future of the oil sands is promising. The Canadian government and Canadian oil companies have developed a plan to increase production from 400,000 barrels of oil a day to 1.2 million barrels of oil a day. By 2020, oil sands could create 44,000 jobs across Canada and make Canada $100 billion.