Several questions on oil sands?

Question

1. How is oil extracted from the oil sands?
2.What are some of the conerns of communities downstream of the Athabasca river?
3.What is the relationship between the Oil Sands project and CO2 emissions?
4. What are the social affects of the Oil Sands project?

please help

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Answer 1

There are several methods of oil extraction.
Extraction process:
- Surface Mining
- Cold Flow
- Cyclic Steam Stimulation (CSS)
- Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD)
- Vapor Extraction Process (VAPEX)
- Toe to Heel Air Injection (THAI)

Large amounts of energy are needed to extract and upgrade the bitumen to synthetic crude. At this point in time, most of this is produced by burning natural gas which is widely available in the tar sands area. Approximately 1.0 to 1.25 gigajoules of natural gas are needed per barrel of bitumen extracted. Since a barrel of oil equivalent is about 6.1 gigajoules, this produces about 5 or 6 times as much energy as is consumed. Energy efficiency is expected to improve to 0.7 gigajoules of energy per barrel by 2015, giving an energy multiplier of about 9:1. However, since natural gas production in Alberta peaked in 2001 and has been static ever since, it is likely tar sands requirements will be met by cutting back natural gas exports to the U.S.

Alternatives to natural gas exist and are available in the tar sands area. Bitumen can itself be used as the fuel, consuming about 30-35% of the raw bitumen per produced unit of synthetic crude. Coal is widely available in Alberta and is inexpensive, but produces large amounts of greenhouse gases. Nuclear power is another option which has been proposed, but did not appear to be economic as of 2005. Nonetheless, Energy Alberta Corporation announced in 2007 that they had filed application for a license to build a new nuclear plant at Lac Cardinal (30 km west of the town of Peace River. The application would see an initial twin AECL ACR-1000 plant go online in 2017, producing 2.2 gigawatt (electric).

Future plants are expected to sequester the combustion products, but for now most ex-situ CO2 is released to the atmosphere.

A major Canadian initiative called the Integrated CO2 Network (ICO2N) is a proposed system for the capture, transport and storage of carbon dioxide (CO2).

Tar sands is a common name of what are more properly called bituminous sands, but also commonly referred to as oil sands or (in Venezuela) extra-heavy oil. They are a mixture of sand or clay, water, and extremely heavy crude oil.

The use of the word tar to describe these deposits is a misnomer, since tar is a man-made substance produced by the destructive distillation of organic material. Although it appears similar, the material in tar sands is a naturally-occurring, extremely heavy form of crude oil in which the lighter fractions of the oil have been lost, and the remaining fractions have been partially biodegraded by bacteria. As a result, the term "oil sands" is technically more accurate.

Conventional crude oil is easily extracted from the ground by drilling wells into the formations, into which light or medium density oil flows under natural reservoir pressures, but tar sand deposits must be strip mined or made to flow into producing wells by in situ techniques which reduce the oil's viscosity using steam and/or solvents. These processes use a great deal of water and require large amounts of energy.

The heavy crude oil or crude bitumen extracted from these deposits is a viscous, solid or semisolid form of oil that does not easily flow at normal ambient temperatures and pressures, making it difficult and expensive to process into gasoline, diesel fuel, and other products. Despite the difficulty and cost, oil sands are now being mined on a vast scale to extract the oil, which is then converted into synthetic oil by oil upgraders, or refined directly into petroleum products by specialized refineries.


Many countries in the world have large deposits of oil sands, including the United States, Russia, and various countries in the Middle East. However, the world's largest deposits occur in two countries: Canada and Venezuela, both of which have oil sands reserves approximately equal to the world's total reserves of conventional crude oil. As a result of the development of these reserves, most Canadian oil production in the 21st century is from oil sands or heavy oil deposits, and Canada is now the largest single supplier of oil and refined products to the United States. Venezuelan production is also very large, but due to political problems its oil production has been declining since the start of the 21st century.

Answer 2

1. Heat, generally generated using natural gas 2. ? 3. CO2 emissions is a problem. The biggest problem mgmt-wise is lack of availability of labor. 4. Does it really matter? People come last in the energy game, and the govt loves the tax revenues.

Answer 3

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