Syncrude and the Athabascan Oil Sands

This week I was hosted by a company Syncrude who is the world's largest producer of Synthetic Crude Petroleum from processed Oil Sands. Not only did I have an opportunity to teach and discuss topics with these fine folks, but was able to go to their plant to do some on-site analysis and see the workings of Oil Sand recovery and processing.

The Oil Sands are a tar-like substance embedded in about 300' thick layer across hundreds of square miles of northern Alberta. In order to get to the oil sands... they must first remove a layer of muskeg, a swampy spongy bog, then about 250'-300' of more earth called 'overburden' to finally get down to the layer they are looking for. They just move the overburden to the side and reuse it later to reclaim the land and return it to a condition better than before without the muskeg so you can have a forest back instead. There is now a thick layer, 300' deep, of sticky black sands impregnated with Bitumen, a tar-like substance. They used to use huge Drag Lines with a monstrous bucket to scoop up the sands and then extremely large scoops and conveyors to transport the material back to the processing plant. But today they use those HUGE trucks and big shovels to load and transport the sand. These Haul Trucks are the largest in the world and can carry between 400 and 600 tons per load! The processing starts by removing the sand from the Bitumen with hot water and agitation. The Sands and water come out and go to a tailings pond to let the sands drop out leaving water on the top of the pond. The Bitumen continues on to more processing to 'crack' the long carbon chains into smaller chunks thus transforming the tar into Light Sweet Crude oil that is sent via pipeline down to refineries to get us the gas and other petroleum products we use. This is a fairly expensive method to extract oil at around $30 per barrel, but with oil selling at $100 per barrel it is fairly lucrative.

They mine over 600,000 tons of oil sands per day, processing this into a Million barrels of oil each day! This plant alone accounts for about 20% of all of Canada's daily oil production. For those of us in the US... this is included in the 'foreign oil' we consume.

Oil production is a dirty, messy, stinky proposition - and the area around the mine is ugly, ugly, ugly. But as they finish mining an area they are required to reclaim the land. Putting back the overburden and re-landscaping the area back to a livable habitat. They spend 100s of millions each year in this reclamation, making forests, lakes, streams, out of what once was some of the ugliest spaces on the planet.

In researching for this blog I came across this graphic of Energy use in the US that I found interesting... spend a moment learning what it has to say.