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.
Husky Energy Inc. is a company engaged in hydrocarbon exploration, headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. It operates in Western and Atlantic Canada, the United States and the Asia Pacific region, with upstream and downstream business segments. In the 2020 Forbes Global 2000, Husky Energy was ranked as the 1443rd-largest public company in the world.
Ovintiv Inc., formerly Encana Corporation, is a hydrocarbon exploration and production company organized in Delaware and headquartered in Denver, United States. It was founded and headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, and was the largest energy company and largest natural gas producer in Canada. The company was rebranded as Ovintiv and relocated to Denver in 2019–20.
Teck Resources Limited, known as Teck Cominco until late 2008, is a diversified natural resources company headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, that is engaged in mining and mineral development, including coal for the steelmaking industry, copper, zinc, and energy. Secondary products include lead, silver, gold, molybdenum, germanium, indium and cadmium. Teck Resources was formed from the amalgamation of Teck and Cominco in 2001. In the 2020 Forbes Global 2000, Teck Resources was ranked as the 1616th -largest public company in the world.
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 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.
Enhanced oil recovery, also called tertiary recovery, is the extraction of crude oil from an oil field that cannot be extracted otherwise. EOR can extract 30% to 60% or more of a reservoir's oil, compared to 20% to 40% using primary and secondary recovery. According to the US Department of Energy, carbon dioxide and water are injected along with one of three EOR techniques: thermal injection, gas injection, and chemical injection. More advanced, speculative EOR techniques are sometimes called quaternary recovery.
Wabasca is an oil field in a remote area of northern Alberta, Canada. It is the fourth largest deposit of oil sands located in Alberta, located southwest of the larger Athabasca oil sands deposit. It is also known as the Pelican Lake Oilfield.
Enerplus Corporation is one of Canada’s largest independent oil and gas producers. The company holds oil and natural gas property interest in the United States and in western Canada, in the provinces of Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan. The company is based out of Calgary, Alberta and trades on both the Toronto Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange. It was Canada's first income trust.
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 an integrated oil and natural gas company headquartered in Calgary, Alberta.
Boundary Dam Power Station is the largest coal fired station owned by SaskPower, located near Estevan, Saskatchewan, Canada.
The Weyburn-Midale Carbon Dioxide Project is, as of 2008, the world's largest carbon capture and storage project. It is located in Midale, Saskatchewan, Canada.
Canadian Natural Resources Limited, or CNRL or Canadian Natural is a senior Canadian oil and natural gas company that operates primarily in the Western Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, with offshore operations in the United Kingdom sector of the North Sea, and offshore Côte d'Ivoire and Gabon. The company, which is headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, has the largest undeveloped base in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin. It is the largest independent producer of natural gas in Western Canada and the largest producer of heavy crude oil in Canada.
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.
Western Canadian Select (WCS) is a heavy sour blend of crude oil that is one of North America's largest heavy crude oil streams. It was established in December 2004 as a new heavy oil stream by EnCana, Canadian Natural Resources Limited, Petro-Canada and Talisman Energy Inc.. It is a heavy blended crude oil, 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 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;
The Alberta Carbon Trunk Line (ACTL) is a 240-kilometre (150 mi) pipeline completed in July 2020, that will collect excess carbon dioxide (CO2) from the province of Alberta and transport it to various oil reservoirs around the province for enhanced oil recovery applications. Pioneered by Enhance Energy, the ACTL will source its CO2 from a fertilizer manufacturing plant in Redwater, and the North West Redwater Partnership bitumen upgrading plant using gasification. It will initially funnel the collected CO2 to Clive, a field discovered in the 1950s and currently produces about 300 barrels per day.
The Canadian province of Alberta faces a number of environmental issues related to natural resource extraction—including oil and gas industry with its oil sands—endangered species, melting glaciers, floods and droughts, wildfires, and global climate change. While the oil and gas industries generates substantial economic wealth, the Athabasca oil sands, which are situated almost entirely in Alberta, are the "fourth most carbon intensive on the planet behind Algeria, Venezuela and Cameroon" according to an August 8, 2018 article in the American Association for the Advancement of Science's journal Science. This article details some of the environmental issues including past ecological disasters in Alberta and describes some of the efforts at the municipal, provincial and federal level to mitigate the risks and impacts.
The Sturgeon Refinery also NWR Sturgeon Refinery is a 80,000 bbl/d (13,000 m3/d) crude oil upgrader—built and operated by North West Redwater Partnership (NWRP) in a public private partnership with the Alberta provincial government. It is located in Sturgeon County northeast of Edmonton, Alberta, in Alberta's Industrial Heartland. Premier Jason Kenney announced on July 6, 2021, that the province of Alberta had acquired NWRP's equity stake, representing 50% of the $10-billion project, with the other 50% owned by Canadian Natural Resources.
The Alberta Carbon Trunk Line System (ACTL) is a $CDN1.2 billion, 240 kilometres (150 mi) CO2-pipeline, owned and operated by Enhance Energy and Wolf Midstream, that captures carbon dioxide from industrial emitters in the Alberta's Industrial Heartland and transports it to "central and southern Alberta for secure storage" in "aging reservoirs", and enhanced oil recovery (EOR) projects. The pipeline, which came online on June 2, 2020, is the first and largest carbon capture and storage (CCS) system" in Alberta, Canada.
CA$923 million(2020) [1]