Athabasca Oil Sands

Mildred Lake mine site and plant

The Athabasca Oil Sands (also known as the Athabasca Tar Sands) are large deposits of bitumen, or extremely heavy crude oil, located in northeastern Alberta, Canada - roughly centered around the boomtown of Fort McMurray. These oil sands consist of a mixture of crude bitumen (a semi-solid form of crude oil), silica sand, clay minerals, and water. The Athabasca deposit is the largest reservoir of crude bitumen in the world and the largest of three major oil sands deposits in Alberta, along with the nearby Peace River and Cold Lake deposits. Together, these oil sand deposits lie under 141,000 square kilometres (54,000 sq mi) of sparsely populated boreal forest and muskeg (peat bogs) and contain about 1.7 trillion barrels (270×10^⁹ m³) of bitumen in-place, comparable in magnitude to the world’s total proven reserves of conventional petroleum.

With modern non-conventional oil production technology, at least 10% of these deposits, or about 170 billion barrels (27×10^⁹ m³) were considered to be economically recoverable at 2006 prices, making Canada’s total oil reserves the second largest in the world, after Saudi Arabia’s. The Athabasca deposit is the only large oil sands reservoir in the world which is suitable for large-scale surface mining, although most of it can only be produced using more recently developed in-situ technology.

Alberta’s oil sands are developed through open-pit mining for approximately 20 percent of the deposit, and in situ extraction technologies for the remainder 80 per cent of the deposit. Open pit mining destroys the Boreal forest of Canada and muskeg. The Alberta government requires companies to restore the land to “equivalent land capability”. This means that the ability of the land to support various land uses after reclamation is similar to what existed, but that the individual land uses may not necessarily be identical. In some particular circumstances the government considers agricultural land to be equivalent to forest land, oil sands companies have reclaimed mined land to use as pasture for endangered buffalo instead of restoring it to the original boreal forest and muskeg^.

Preceding text, shamelessly stolen from wikipedia.