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Tar Sands

Tar sands, or oil or bituminous sand, comprise bitumen (for example asphalt and tar) mixed in with sand, clay and water. Those which have been exploited so far have been strip mined.

Two thirds of the world's oil is believed to be in the form of tar sands, most of it in the Venezuelan Orinoco tar sands or the Athabasca Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada, although there are deposits all over the world. It takes 2 tons of tar sand to produce one barrel of synthetic crude oil. Because extracting bitumen is a relatively expensive process, it is only worthwhile when oil prices are high.

Bitumen is extracted by mixing it with hot water, then skimming the oil off the top. The ease with which this can be done varies. Bitumen is a lot thicker than crude oil, so it has to be chemically split or mixed with lighter petroleum before it can even be pumped along an oil pipeline.

A lot of the tar sands are too deep for open-put mining. To get at these it is necessary to pump a lot of steam underground and liquefy the bitumen before bringing it up to the surface. This needs a lot of energy and a lot of water and creates a lot of waste water. It is not clear if the process would be feasible or environmentally acceptable. The process that is being used at Athabasca could yield 750,000 barrels (150,000 m³) of crude oil per day.

Tar sands should not be confused with oil shale, which is a fine-grained sedimentary rock that contains a bituminous substance, though there are some similarities in the mining and extraction.

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Tar Sands Make Canada Energy Powerhouse,   Extracting Oil From Shale Complex Process,
Oil-Price Surge Prompts New Look at Shale

The Muskeg River Mine in Alberta, Canada is a vast open pit of black, sticky sand from which crude oil is extracted. Such tar sands account for about 1 million barrels of Canada's oil output a day. Extracting oil from unconventional sources such as sand is more expensive than conventional oil drilling, but is now economical for Canada which estimates it has 175 billion barrels of oil, enough to supply U.S. demands for at least a generation. Environmental impact assessments have not yet been completed.

It takes a lot of water and energy to extract the oil. Canada is considering a natural gas pipeline from the Canadian arctic or a nuclear energy plant. Environmentalists are opposed.

The USA is looking to see if it would now be practical and economical to extract oil from its oil shale deposits, but it will be years before this is known. It has yet to work out how to extract oil, of which there is an estimated 1 trillion barrels or more, from shale deep below the surface from western Colorado into northeastern Utah and southwestern Wyoming. The reserves are believed to be 4 times those of Saudi Arabia. The extraction would involve heating the oil. There are also environmental concerns, particularly with groundwater contamination. There was some shale extraction during the late 1970s when the oil price spiked.

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