Oil sands, tar sands, crude bitumen, or bituminous sands, are a type of unconventional petroleum deposit. Oil sands are either loose sands or partially consolidated sandstone containing a naturally occurring mixture of sand, clay, and water, soaked with bitumen, a dense and extremely viscous form of petroleum.
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 centred on the boomtown of Fort McMurray. These oil sands, hosted primarily in the McMurray Formation, consist of a mixture of crude bitumen, silica sand, clay minerals, and water. The Athabasca deposit is the largest known 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.
Gullfaks is an oil and gas field in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea operated by Equinor. It was discovered in 1978, in block 34/10, at a water depth of 130-230 meters. The initial recoverable reserve is 2.1 billion barrels, and the remaining recoverable reserve in 2004 is 234 million barrels. This oil field reached peak production in 2001 at 180,000 barrels per day (29,000 m3/d). It has satellite fields Gullfaks South, Rimfaks, Skinfaks and Gullveig.
Pakistan Petroleum Limited (PPL) is a Pakistani state-owned petroleum company. It was incorporated on 5 June 1950, when it inherited the assets and liabilities of the Burmah Oil Company Ltd. which initially holds 70% of the share with the rest mostly held by the government of Pakistan (GoP). As of June 2011, Government of Pakistan held 70.66% of the shares.
Petroleum production in Canada is a major industry which is important to the economy of North America. Canada has the third largest oil reserves in the world and is the world's fourth largest oil producer and fourth largest oil exporter. In 2019 it produced an average of 750,000 cubic metres per day (4.7 Mbbl/d) of crude oil and equivalent. Of that amount, 64% was upgraded and non-upgraded bitumen from oil sands, and the remainder light crude oil, heavy crude oil and natural-gas condensate. Most of Canadian petroleum production is exported, approximately 600,000 cubic metres per day (3.8 Mbbl/d) in 2019, with 98% of the exports going to the United States. Canada is by far the largest single source of oil imports to the United States, providing 43% of US crude oil imports in 2015.
The Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin (WCSB) is a vast sedimentary basin underlying 1,400,000 square kilometres (540,000 sq mi) of Western Canada including southwestern Manitoba, southern Saskatchewan, Alberta, northeastern British Columbia and the southwest corner of the Northwest Territories. It consists of a massive wedge of sedimentary rock extending from the Rocky Mountains in the west to the Canadian Shield in the east. This wedge is about 6 kilometres (3.7 mi) thick under the Rocky Mountains, but thins to zero at its eastern margins. The WCSB contains one of the world's largest reserves of petroleum and natural gas and supplies much of the North American market, producing more than 16,000,000,000 cubic feet (450,000,000 m3) per day of gas in 2000. It also has huge reserves of coal. Of the provinces and territories within the WCSB, Alberta has most of the oil and gas reserves and almost all of the oil sands.
Tsimiroro is a large oil field in the onshore Morondava Basin of Madagascar found south of the Bemolanga ultra heavy oil field and south of the town of Morafenobe. It is estimated to contain as many as 9.3 billion barrels (1.48×109 m3) of heavy oil with 14° to 16° API gravity. The oil is found in the Isalo and Amboloando formations.
Madagascar Oil SA is an oil company operating in Madagascar. It is the principal onshore oil company in Madagascar in terms of oil resources and land.
Canada's oil sands and heavy oil resources are among the world's great petroleum deposits. They include the vast oil sands of northern Alberta, and the heavy oil reservoirs that surround the small city of Lloydminster, which sits on the border between Alberta and Saskatchewan. The extent of these resources is well known, but better technologies to produce oil from them are still being developed.
The Canadian petroleum industry arose in parallel with that of the United States. Because of Canada's unique geography, geology, resources and patterns of settlement, however, it developed in different ways. The evolution of the petroleum sector has been a key factor in the history of Canada, and helps illustrate how the country became quite distinct from her neighbour to the south.
Canada's early petroleum discoveries took place near population centres or along lines of penetration into the frontier.
Kukersite is a light-brown marine type oil shale of Ordovician age. It is found in the Baltic Oil Shale Basin in Estonia and North-West Russia. It is of the lowest Upper Ordovician formation, formed some 460 million years ago. It was named after the German name of the Kukruse Manor in the north-east of Estonia by the Russian paleobotanist Mikhail Zalessky in 1917. Some minor kukersite resources occur in sedimentary basins of Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and Oklahoma in North America and in Amadeus and Canning basins Australia.
The Bakken Formation is a rock unit from the Late Devonian to Early Mississippian age occupying about 200,000 square miles (520,000 km2) of the subsurface of the Williston Basin, underlying parts of Montana, North Dakota, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The formation was initially described by geologist J.W. Nordquist in 1953. The formation is entirely in the subsurface, and has no surface outcrop. It is named after Henry O. Bakken (1901-1982), a farmer in Tioga, North Dakota, who owned the land where the formation was initially discovered while drilling for oil.
The proven oil reserves in Saudi Arabia are reportedly the second largest in the world, estimated to be 268 billion barrels, including 2.5 Gbbl in the Saudi–Kuwaiti neutral zone. In the oil industry, an oil barrel is defined as 42 US gallons, which is about 159 litres, or 35 imperial gallons. They are predominantly found in the Eastern Province. These reserves were apparently the largest in the world until Venezuela announced they had increased their proven reserves to 297 Gbbl in January 2011. The Saudi reserves are about one-fifth of the world's total conventional oil reserves. A large fraction of these reserves comes from a small number of very large oil fields, and past production amounts to 40% of the stated reserves.
As of 2007, the proven oil reserves in Mexico were 12.4 billion barrels. The US Energy Information Administration estimated Mexican proved reserves to be 10.3 billion barrels as of 2013.
Everette Lee DeGolyer, was a prominent oil company executive, petroleum exploration geophysicist and philanthropist in Dallas. He was known as "the founder of applied geophysics in the petroleum industry", as "the father of American geophysics," and was a legendary collector of rare and often early edition books primarily in the fields of Southwestern history, railroads, law, geology, science, and both English and American literature.
The Duvernay Formation is a stratigraphical unit of Frasnian age in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin.
Skirne which also includes the Byggve deposit is an offshore gas field in the North Sea located 24 kilometres (15 mi) east of the Heimdal gas field and 140 kilometres (87 mi) from Stavanger, Norway. The depth of the water in the field area is 120 metres (390 ft). Both Skirne and Byggve are considered satellites to Heimdal field and are connected to it by subsea pipelines. TotalFinaElf which is the operator had received the approval from Norwegian Ministry of Petroleum and Energy for development of the fields in 2002. The company holds 40% interest in the project. Other stakeholders are Petoro and Centrica. Both Skirne and Byggve have an estimated 230 billion cubic feet of natural gas and about 10 million barrels of condensate, combined.
Búzios oil field is a large ultra-deepwater oil field located in the Santos Basin, about 230 km (140 mi) off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Originally named Franco oil field, it was the second largest pre-salt find in the basin since 2007, behind Tupi oil field, which holds between 5 and 8 billion barrels equivalent and is located just south of the Búzios oil field.
The Thar coalfield is located in Thar Desert, Tharparkar District of Sindh province in Pakistan. The deposits—16th-largest coal reserves in the world, were discovered in 1991 by Geological Survey of Pakistan (GSP) and the United States Agency for International Development.
