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 that constitute unconventional resources, 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.
CNOOC Petroleum North America ULC, formerly known as Nexen, is a Canadian oil and gas company based in Calgary, Alberta.
Petroleum production in Canada is a major industry which is important to the overall 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 from unconventional oil sands, and the remainder light crude oil, heavy crude oil and natural-gas condensate. Most of the 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 Ministry of Energy is a Cabinet-level agency of the government of the Canadian province of Alberta responsible for coordinating policy relating to the development of mineral and energy resources. It is also responsible for assessing and collecting non-renewable resource (NRR) royalties, freehold mineral taxes, rentals, and bonuses. The Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission, which is fully integrated with the Department of Energy within the ministry, and fully funded by the Crown, accepts delivery of the Crown's royalty share of conventional crude oil and sells it at the current market value. The current ministry was formed in 1986, but ministries with other names dealing with energy resources go back to the Ministry of Lands and Mines in 1930.
Steam-assisted gravity drainage is an enhanced oil recovery technology for producing heavy crude oil and bitumen. It is an advanced form of steam stimulation in which a pair of horizontal wells are drilled into the oil reservoir, one a few metres above the other. High pressure steam is continuously injected into the upper wellbore to heat the oil and reduce its viscosity, causing the heated oil to drain into the lower wellbore, where it is pumped out. Dr. Roger Butler, engineer at Imperial Oil from 1955 to 1982, invented the steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) process in the 1970s. Butler "developed the concept of using horizontal pairs of wells and injected steam to develop certain deposits of bitumen considered too deep for mining". In 1983 Butler became director of technical programs for the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority (AOSTRA), a crown corporation created by Alberta Premier Lougheed to promote new technologies for oil sands and heavy crude oil production. AOSTRA quickly supported SAGD as a promising innovation in oil sands extraction technology.
OPTI Canada is a Calgary, Alberta based oil sands development company. Established in 1999, its sole project is the Long Lake oil sands project, of which it owns 35%. The remaining 65% is owned by project operator Nexen Inc.
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.
Steam injection is an increasingly common method of extracting heavy crude oil. Used commercially since the 1960s, it is considered an enhanced oil recovery (EOR) method and is the main type of thermal stimulation of oil reservoirs. There are several different forms of the technology, with the two main ones being Cyclic Steam Stimulation and Steam Flooding. Both are most commonly applied to oil reservoirs, which are relatively shallow and which contain crude oils which are very viscous at the temperature of the native underground formation. Steam injection is widely used in the San Joaquin Valley of California (US), the Lake Maracaibo area of Venezuela, and the oil sands of northern Alberta, Canada.
The 2007 Alberta Royalty Review was an independent panel, chaired by William M. Hunter, established by the government of Alberta to review the level of resource royalties collected by the provincial government from petroleum and natural gas companies. In their final report entitled "Our Fair Share" released on September 18, 2007 the panel concluded that Albertans, who own their natural resources, were not receiving their "fair share" from energy development. Royalty rates and formulas had "not kept pace with changes in the resource base and world energy markets." As a result of the review new regulations came into effect under the Alberta Mines and Minerals Act including the Petroleum Royalty Regulation, 2009, and the Natural Gas Royalty Regulation, 2009. The government of Alberta expected to collect approximately $2 billion annually with new royalty formulas implemented in 2009. Instead of an increase in royalties on oil and gas, Alberta collected $13.5 billion less from 2009 to 2014 with the new formula. There was a flaw in the 2009 New Well Royalty Rate formula which was in effect by May 1, 2011, regarding the royalties on gas which had provided almost 67% of total royalties collected by Alberta prior to 2009. Under the 2009 formula applied to Natural Gas and By-products represented a decrease from the previous fixed rates. With this formula gas royalties declined by approximately $5 billion per year and provided only 17% of total royalties. In 2008 the global price of oil plummeted from an all-time high of $145 a barrel on July 8, 2008 to $32 a barrel later in 2008 resulting in "the cancellation of many energy projects" in Alberta. By 2015 several of these oil projects had not resumed. In spite of this, Alberta collected $2 billion in oil sands royalties in the post-2009 period with the new rate of 20% compared to $1.5 billion from 2004 to 2009 with the old rate of 15%.
The Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority (AOSTRA) was an Alberta crown corporation to promote the development and use of new technology for oil sands and heavy crude oil production, and enhanced recovery of conventional crude oil. It was funded by the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund. Its head office and information centre were located in Edmonton, Alberta and a second office in Calgary, Alberta in Canada.
The Clearwater Formation is a stratigraphic unit of Early Cretaceous (Albian) age in the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin in northeastern Alberta, Canada. It was first defined by R.G. McConnell in 1893 and takes its name from the Clearwater River near Fort McMurray.
Although there are numerous oil companies operating in Canada, as of 2009, the majority of production, refining and marketing was done by fewer than 20 of them. According to the 2013 edition of Forbes Global 2000, canoils.com and any other list that emphasizes market capitalization and revenue when sizing up companies, as of March 31, 2014 these are the largest Canada-based oil and gas companies.
Cenovus Energy Inc. is a Canadian integrated oil and natural gas company headquartered in Calgary, Alberta.
Petrobank was an oil exploration, development, and production company based in Calgary, Canada. It operates through 4 units/subsidiaries, PetroBakken Energy in Canada, Petrominerales Ltd in Peru and Colombia, HBU in the heavy crude oil business, and its technology unit Archon Technologies Ltd . In 1986 the company changed its name from Petrobank Energy Resources Ltd. to Petrobank Energy and Resources Ltd. Though it has a significant resource base its ten patents for heavy oil extracting technology are becoming increasingly valuable to the company. In December 2010 the company received permission from the government of Alberta to produce oil sands bitumen at a new location in Dawson using a technique known as fireflooding, the third Petrobank operation that will use it; the 50% interest in Dawson was acquired in October from Shell Canada.
The Long Lake oil sands upgrader project is an in situ oil extraction project near Anzac, Alberta, 40 km (25 mi) southeast of Fort McMurray in the Athabasca oil sands region of Alberta.
MEG Energy is a pure play Canadian oil sands producer engaged in exploration in Northern Alberta. All of its oil reserves are more than 1,000 feet (300 m) below the surface and so they depend on steam-assisted gravity drainage and associated technology to produce. The company's main thermal project is Christina Lake. 85-megawatt cogeneration plants are used to produce the steam used in SAGD which is required to bring bitumen to the surface. The excess heat and electricity produced at its plants is then sold to Alberta's power grid. Its proven reserves have been independently pegged at 1.7 billion barrels and probable reserves 3.7 billion barrels ; That's significant considering only 300 billion barrels of the 1.6 trillion barrels of bitumen in Alberta is considered recoverable under current technology. The value of those reserves is over $19.8 billion. CNOOC has a minority 16.69% interest in MEG Energy.
Laricina Energy Ltd. was a private Canadian oil producing company engaged in exploration in North-Eastern Alberta. The company targeted oil sands opportunities outside of the Athabasca mining area and was focusing on in situ plays in the Grosmont and Grand Rapids formations. Its headquarters were located in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Western Canadian Select (WCS) is a heavy sour blend of crude oil that is one of North America's largest heavy crude oil streams and, historically, its cheapest. It was established in December 2004 as a new heavy oil stream by EnCana (now Cenovus), Canadian Natural Resources, Petro-Canada (now Suncor) and Talisman Energy (now Repsol Oil & Gas Canada). It is composed mostly of bitumen blended with sweet synthetic and condensate diluents and 21 existing streams of both conventional and unconventional Alberta heavy crude oils at the large Husky Midstream General Partnership terminal in Hardisty, Alberta. Western Canadian Select—the benchmark for heavy, acidic (TAN <1.1) crudes—is one of many petroleum products from the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin oil sands. Calgary-based Husky Energy, now a subsidiary of Cenovus, had joined the initial four founders in 2015.
Railbit is a common blend of bitumen and diluent used for rail transport. Railbit which contains approximately 17% diluents or less. compared to 30% in dilbit. Dilbit can be transported through pipelines but railbit cannot. To prevent solidifying in lower temperatures, both raw bitumen and railbit require insulated rail cars with steam-heated coils. Because it has a smaller percentage of diluents, railbit crude requires special capacity rail unload terminals capable of loading railbit and of handling larger unit trains. By the fall 2013 approximately 25% had that capacity. The U.S. State Department in their 2014 Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) regarding the proposed extension to the Keystone Pipeline, acknowledged that,
[R]aw bitumen by rail could provide better netbacks than dilbit by pipeline. Dedicated rail cars, DRUs, and/or rail terminal equipment are needed to effectively transport rawbit, which explains why most producers opt for pipelines given current infrastructure. There are increasing reports of producers doing increased testing of the potential to ship rawbit.
$872.8 million CAN (2011) [1] 
