Utah oil sands

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Utah Tar Sands UtahTarSands.png
Utah Tar Sands

In the United States a large supply of oil sands are found in Eastern Utah. These deposits of bitumen or heavy crude oil have the ability to generate about 12 to 19 billion barrels from a number of prominent sites. [1]

Contents

History

Since the early 1900s the oil sand deposits have been extracted mainly for the use of road pavement. Later, in the 1970s, oil companies began to experiment with the deposits in the hope of using it for their benefit. These experiments ended in the late 1980s when the technologies being used were concluded inefficient and too expensive. [2] Recently, oil companies have again become interested in Utah's oil sands. Now that conventional oil is becoming harder to find, oil sands have become an alternative fuel source.

Production sites

Mountains of the Uintah Basin in Utah Naturalist Basin.jpg
Mountains of the Uintah Basin in Utah

Utah's oil sands are made up of several different deposits all consisting of different amounts of heavy or crude oil. These sites are mostly found on public lands. They are mainly close together and many are found within the Uintah Basin of Utah, which is a section of the Colorado Plateaus province. Some of these sites include Sunnyside, P.R. Spring, Asphalt Ridge, Hill Creek, Circle Ridge, Circle Cliffs, White Rocks, and the Tar Sand Triangle, the highest deposit. [2]

Tar Sand Triangle

The Tar Sand Triangle is located in Southeastern Utah and covers an area of 148,000 acres (600 km2). It is located between the Dirty Devil and Colorado Rivers in Wayne and Garfield Counties. The Tar Sand Triangle is the largest deposit of oil sands in the United States known today. It contains about 6.3 billion barrels of heavy oil, but is thought to have originally held more. At one point the Tar Sand Triangle could have consisted of 16 billion barrels of heavy oil, almost as much as in Utah today. [3]

See also


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Oil sands Type of unconventional oil deposit

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.

Athabasca oil sands

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.

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For Peak brand motor oil, see Peak.

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Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin

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The Utah Oil Sands Joint Venture is a joint venture between Nevtah Capital Management, Inc., and Black Sands Energy Corp. to develop oil sands resources at the Uintah Basin in Utah.

Oil reserves in Canada

Oil reserves in Canada were estimated at 172 billion barrels as of the start of 2015 . This figure includes the oil sands reserves that are estimated by government regulators to be economically producible at current prices using current technology. According to this figure, Canada's reserves are third only to Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. Over 95% of these reserves are in the oil sands deposits in the province of Alberta. Alberta contains nearly all of Canada's oil sands and much of its conventional oil reserves. The balance is concentrated in several other provinces and territories. Saskatchewan and offshore areas of Newfoundland in particular have substantial oil production and reserves. Alberta has 39% of Canada's remaining conventional oil reserves, offshore Newfoundland 28% and Saskatchewan 27%, but if oil sands are included, Alberta's share is over 98%.

Oil reserves in Venezuela

The proven oil reserves in Venezuela are recognized as the largest in the world, totaling 300 billion barrels (4.8×1010 m3) as of 1 January 2014. The 2019 edition of the BP Statistical Review of World Energy reports the total proved reserves of 303.3 billion barrels for Venezuela (slightly more than Saudi Arabia's 297.7 billion barrels).

Melville Island oil sands

The Melville Island oil sands are a large deposit of oil sands on Melville Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.

Cold Lake oil sands

The Cold Lake oil sands are a large deposit of oil sands located near Cold Lake, Alberta. Cold Lake is east of Alberta's capital, Edmonton, near Alberta's border with Saskatchewan, and a small portion of the Cold Lake field lies in Saskatchewan.

Peace River oil sands

Located in northwest-central Alberta, the Peace River oil sands deposit is the smallest of four large deposits of oil sands of the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin formation.

Carabobo Field

Carabobo is an oil field located in Venezuela's Orinoco Belt. As one of the world's largest accumulations of recoverable oil, the recent discoveries in the Orinoco Belt have led to Venezuela holding the world's largest recoverable reserves in the world, surpassing Saudi Arabia in July 2010. The Carabobo oil field is majority owned by Venezuela's national oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA). Owning the majority of the Orinoco Belt, and its estimated 1.18 trillion barrels of oil in place, PDVSA is now the fourth largest oil company in the world. The field is well known for its extra Heavy crude oils, having an average specific gravity between 4 and 16 °API. The Orinoco Belt holds 90% of the world's extra heavy crude oils, estimated at 256 billion recoverable barrels. While production is in its early development, the Carabobo field is expected to produce 400,000 barrels of oil per day.

Petroteq Energy

Petroteq Energy, Inc. is a Canadian oil and gas company. Petroteq Energy's oil sands extraction operations are located in Utah.

References

  1. "About Tar Sands." Oil Shale and Tar Sands Programmatic EIS Information Center. The U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, 19 Nov. 2008. Web. 14 Oct. 2009
  2. 1 2 "The Utah Tar Sands." Oil Sands Recovery Technology. Nevtah Capital Management Corp., 7 July 2008. Web. 12 Oct. 2009
  3. HUNTOON, J.E., P.L. HANSLEY, and N.D. NAESER. "The Search for a Source Rock for the Giant Tar Sand Triangle Accumulation, Southeastern Utah." AAPG Bulletin 83 (1999): 467-495. Web. 14 Oct. 2009