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At a
Glance
Location: 435 Km northeast of Edmonton on Highway 63
Population: 64,441- city and 79,810 - Municipality
Average Temperature: January -19.8 C July +16.6
Annual Rainfall: 334.5 mm
Annual Snowfall: 172.0 cm
Hours of Sunshine/Year 2108.9
Elevation: 370 m
Industries: Oil sands, natural gas and pipeline
sectors, forestry, tourism, retail
The largest city in
'Athabasca oil sands country' is Fort McMurray,
which is in the Regional Municipality of Wood
Buffalo. With the petroleum industry as prominent as
it is locally, it should come as no surprise that
the city's slogan is "We have the Energy!"
The
sands in which the oil is trapped is called bitumen.
What is Bitumen?
Oil sands are a mixture of sand, water, clay and
bitumen. Bitumen naturally occurs along the river
banks and in the Athabasca River area. Bitumen is
oil that is too heavy or thick to flow or be pumped
without being diluted or heated – at 11 degrees
Celsius bitumen is as hard as a hockey puck.
Canada’s oil sands are found in three deposits –
Fort Mc Murray, Peace River and Cold Lake areas in
Alberta and part of Saskatchewan. The greatest
quantity is found in the Athabasca deposit.The oil
sands are sometimes called tar sands.
Mining Bitumen
There are two different methods of producing oil
from the oil sands: open-pit mining and in situ
(Latin, meaning "in place"). Bitumen that is close
to the surface is mined. Bitumen that occurs deep
within the ground is produced in situ using
specialized extraction techniques.
Open Pit Mining
Open-pit mining is similar to many coal mining
operations – large shovels scoop the oil sand into
trucks that then take it to crushers where the large
clumps of earth are broken down. This mixture is
then thinned out with water and transported to a
plant, where the bitumen is separated from the other
components and upgraded to create synthetic oil.
This technique is sometimes misrepresented as the
only method of mining oil sands. Just 20 per cent of
the oil sands are recoverable through open-pit
mining.
In
Situ Drilling
80 per cent of oil sands reserves (which underlie
approximately 97 per cent of the oil sands surface
area) are recoverable through in situ technology,
with limited surface disturbance.
Advances in technology, such as directional
drilling, enable in situ operations to drill
multiple wells (sometimes more than 20) from a
single location, further reducing the surface
disturbance.
The majority of in situ operations use
steam-assisted gravity drainage, or SAGD. This
method involves pumping steam underground through a
horizontal well to liquefy the bitumen that is then
pumped to the surface through a second well.
The Issues:
Environmental Impacts
Our industry understands that Canadians are
concerned about the impacts of our work, and expect
that industry will manage the resource responsibly.
The oil sands have generated much public debate, and
with that, some misinformation. It’s important to
separate fact and fiction and to have a balanced
conversation about oil sands development. There are
a number of environmental issues in the oil sands,
all of which require a commitment to technology and
innovation to overcome.
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