What Are Oil Sands?
Oil sands, or tar sands, are sand and rock material that include crude bitumen—a dense, viscous form of crude oil. Bitumen is just too thick to glide on its own, so extraction methods are very important. Bitumen is extracted and processed the usage of two methods: mining and in-situ recovery.
Oil sands are came upon necessarily inside the Athabasca, Cold Lake, and Peace River spaces of northern Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada, and in areas of Venezuela, Kazakhstan, and Russia. Oil sands industry as part of crude oil commodities.
Key Takeaways
- Oil sands or tar sands are sand and rock materials which include crude bitumen, a thick and viscous liquid.
- The highest made from oil sands is conventional oil. However, the option to extract it is much more expensive and environmentally harmful as compared to other methods, very similar to oil rigs.
- Canada has the third-largest showed oil reserves after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.
Understanding Oil Sands
The highest product from oil sands is very similar to, if not upper than, that of conventional oil which uses oil rigs for extraction. Intensive mining, extraction, and upgrading processes suggest that oil from oil sands usually costs quite a lot of cases additional to offer than the usage of conventional methods and is environmentally harmful. The process of extracting bitumen from oil sands ends up in important emissions, destruction to the land, hostile impacts on the wildlife, air air pollution of the local water supply, and much more.
Without reference to the hostile environmental impact, oil sands produce important source of revenue for Canada, which will depend on oil sands as a significant portion of its monetary smartly being.
Canada has an estimated 171 billion barrels of showed oil reserves, of which 166.3 billion barrels are found in Alberta’s oil sands. At the end of 2014, Canada ranked 0.33 on the planet in showed reserves after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. This means oil sands are a significant factor of Canada’s financial machine in the case of investment, employment, and source of revenue.
Way of Extracting Oil From Oil Sands
In ground mining oil sands, clearing large land areas of bushes and brush is the first step. The topsoil and clay are removed to show the oil sand. This ground mining means makes use of large trucks and shovels to remove the sand, which may have a amount of anywhere from 1% to 20% of tangible bitumen. After processing and upgrading, the results shuttle to refineries for refining into gasoline, jet gas, and other petroleum products.
The mining means is considered to be very damaging to the environment, as it involves leveling numerous sq. miles of land, bushes, and wildlife. Oil sands operators must develop a plan to reclaim the land and have this authorized by the use of the government. Since oil sands operations began in Canada inside the Sixties, merely 8% of total mining area has been reclaimed or is inside the process of reclamation.
Every other means of mining oil sands is in-situ, sometimes called in-situ recovery (ISR) or answer mining. It is basically used to extract bitumen in oil sand that is buried too deep underneath the earth’s ground for recovery with a truck and shovel.
In situ technology injects steam and chemical substances deep beneath the ground to separate the viscous bitumen from the sand and then pump it up to the out of doors. The bitumen then goes by means of the an identical upgrading process as it will inside the ground mining means.
Because of mining for oil sands is very expensive, the price of oil is an important take into consideration get advantages era for mining firms. If the price of oil drops too low then mining oil sands will not be monetarily actually helpful.
The in situ means is additional expensive than the out of doors mining means, alternatively it is a lot much less damaging to the environment, requiring only some hundred meters of land and a nearby water provide to accomplish. After drilling holes, a mining answer is pumped into the soil. From time to time explosions or hydraulic fracturing is also implemented to open pathways.
It is estimated by the use of the Alberta executive that 80% of oil inside the oil sands is buried too deep for open-pit mining; because of this reality, in situ methods could be the future of extracting oil from oil sands. The most common form of in situ is called steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD).
Environmental Protection and Oil Sands
The environmental impact of extracting oil sands from Alberta’s oil fields has led environmentalists to object to the oil pipeline that connects the country with the us.
Organizations, very similar to Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA), are fascinated about lowering the environmental impact of mining oil sands for oil. They provide funding for research duties related to mitigating the environmental impact of mining for oil sands. The gang provides in-depth wisdom related to mining, wildfire risks, vegetation, industry critiques, research critiques, and further.
