Oil Sands

What Are Oil Sands?

Oil sands, or tar sands, are sand and rock material that contain crude bitumen — a thick, gooey form of crude oil. Bitumen is too thick to flow all alone, so extraction methods are important. Bitumen is extricated and handled utilizing two methods: mining and in-situ recovery.

Oil sands are found principally in the Athabasca, Cold Lake, and Peace River locales of northern Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada, and in areas of Venezuela, Kazakhstan, and Russia. Oil sands trade as part of crude oil commodities.

Understanding Oil Sands

The final result from oil sands is basically the same as, while perhaps not better than, that of conventional oil which utilizations oil rigs for extraction. Intensive mining, extraction, and overhauling processes mean that oil from oil sands regularly costs several times more to create than utilizing conventional methods and is environmentally destructive. The most common way of separating bitumen from oil sands brings about critical emissions, destruction to the land, negative impacts on the untamed life, pollution of the neighborhood water supply, and considerably more.

In spite of the negative environmental impact, oil sands produce critical revenue for Canada, which depends on oil sands as a huge portion of its economic wellbeing.

Canada has an estimated 171 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, of which 166.3 billion barrels are found in Alberta's oil sands. Toward the finish of 2014, Canada positioned third in the world in proven reserves after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. This means oil sands are a huge part of Canada's economy in terms of investment, employment, and revenue.

Interaction of Extracting Oil From Oil Sands

In surface mining oil sands, clearing large land areas of trees and brush is the initial step. The topsoil and mud are taken out to uncover the oil sand. This surface mining method utilizes large trucks and shovels to eliminate the sand, which can have a volume of somewhere in the range of 1% to 20% of genuine bitumen. In the wake of processing and updating, the outcomes travel to treatment facilities for refining into gas, fly fuel, and other petroleum products.

The mining method is viewed as extremely harming to the environment, as it includes evening out many square miles of land, trees, and natural life. Oil sands administrators must foster a plan to recover the land and have this approved by the government. Since oil sands operations started in Canada during the 1960s, just 8% of total mining area has been recovered or is presently reclamation.

One more method of mining oil sands is in-situ, additionally called in-situ recovery (ISR) or solution mining. It is basically used to extricate bitumen in oil sand that is covered too deep below the earth's surface for recovery with a truck and shovel.

In situ technology infuses steam and synthetic substances deep underneath the ground to separate the gooey bitumen from the sand and afterward pump it up to the surface. The bitumen then, at that point, goes through the equivalent updating process as it would in the surface mining method.

Since mining for oil sands is very costly, the price of oil is a critical factor in profit generation for mining companies. On the off chance that the price of oil drops too low, mining oil sands may not be fiscally beneficial.

The in situ method is more exorbitant than the surface mining method, however it is less harming to the environment, requiring two or three hundred meters of land and a close by water source to operate. Subsequent to drilling openings, a mining solution is pumped into the soil. Now and again blasts or hydraulic fracturing might be used to open pathways.

It is estimated by the Alberta government that 80% of oil in the oil sands is covered too deep for open-pit mining; in this manner, in situ methods will probably be the future of removing oil from oil sands. The most common form of in situ is called steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD).

Environmental Protection and Oil Sands

The environmental impact of extricating oil sands from Alberta's oil fields has driven environmentalists to protest the oil pipeline that interfaces the country with the United States.

Organizations, for example, Canada's Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA), are centered around decreasing the environmental impact of mining oil sands for oil. They give funding to research drives connected with moderating the environmental impact of mining for oil sands. The organization gives inside and out information connected with mining, out of control fire risks, vegetation, industry reports, research reports, and that's just the beginning.

Features

• Oil sands or tar sands are sand and rock materials which contain crude bitumen, a thick and gooey liquid.
• The final result of oil sands is conventional oil. Notwithstanding, the interaction to remove it is considerably more costly and environmentally hurtful as compared to different methods, for example, oil rigs.
• Canada has the third-largest proven oil reserves after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.