Oilsands Tour

Last Friday, Steven, Dad and I took an Oilsands Tour which starts at the Oil Sands Discovery Centre and then takes you out to Suncor. It was pretty interesting, but I suffered from extreme brain overload and all I can remember after 3 hours is that 4,000 people work at this particular site, they pump 200,000 barrels of crude every day and one tire on a 797 haul truck costs $60,000. It’s mind boggling how big it all is and even more mind boggling that someone actually knows where all these pipes go!
They also talked a lot about tailings ponds and their reclamation efforts. (Don’t know what a tailings pond is? Have a look-see here.
It used to take 40 years for a tailings pond to settle out enough to be reclaimable, but now they’ve figured out a way to do it in about 7 years. Ducks of the world, rejoice!

There’s Oil in Them Thar Sands!

What exactly is oil sand you ask? Well, here it is! It’s sand covered in a thin layer of water, encased in a layer of bitumen. So yes; oil mixed with sand -- just as you suspected!
We came across some last weekend when we were out exploring, so I thought I’d give you a little educational post today. Don’t worry, it’s a very dumbed-down version!
Oil sand occurs naturally in the ground in many parts of the world, only here in northern Alberta there is a lot of it. The deposit here is 140,000 square km - about the size of Florida. The goal of the oil companies is of course to separate the oil from the sand and turn it into something useable. Around Ft. Mac the oil sands are fairly close to the surface so they are literally dug out of the ground in giant open-pit mines. The majority of Alberta’s oil sands (80%) are too far below the surface to be mined this way so they are recovered using in-situ methods, ie: drilling. The amount of land that is actually mineable is 500 square km – about the size of Toronto.
And that’s pretty much all I can wrap my brain around for today! One of these days I will make it to the Oil Sands Discovery Centre and learn more.

I’ll leave you with a few fun facts:
-Two tonnes of oil sands must be dug up, moved and processed to produce one barrel of oil.
-Northern Alberta has the second largest oil reserves in the world, after Saudi Arabia
-The oil sand reserves in N. Alberta are about the size of Florida. The part currently being mined is about the size of the Kennedy Space Centre.
-There is enough oil in Northern Alberta to provide Canada with all it needs for the next 400 years.
-There are 91 active oil sands projects in Alberta. 5 are open pit mines.
-The mines around Ft.Mac are active 24/7/365. They only stop if it’s -50 and the giant trucks won’t start or when Greenpeace is chained to something.