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Topic: Tar sands

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	Tar Sands Basics
		The bitumen in tar sands cannot be pumped from the ground in its natural state; instead tar sand deposits are mined, usually using strip mining or open pit techniques or produced in-situ by underground heating or other tertiary recovery processes.
		Tar sands are mined and processed to generate oil similar to oil pumped from conventional oil wells, but extracting oil from tar sands is more complex than conventional oil recovery.
		While tar sands are found in many places worldwide, the largest deposits in the world are found in Canada (Alberta) and Venezuela, which each have about one-third of the world's total tar sands resources, and much of the rest is found in various countries in the Middle East.
	ostseis.anl.gov /guide/tarsands/index.cfm (879 words)

	Tar sands - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Oil sands, also referred to as tar sands or bituminous sands, are a combination of clay, sand, water, and bitumen.
		Venezuela prefers to call its tar sands "extra-heavy oil", and although distinction is somewhat academic, the extra-heavy crude oil deposit of the Orinoco Belt represent nearly 90% of the known global reserves of extra-heavy oil.
		Oil Sands Discovery Centre Provided that the water chemistry is appropriate to allow bitumen to separate from sand and clay, the combination of hot water and agitation releases bitumen from the oil sand, and allows small air bubbles to attach to the bitumen droplets.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Tar_sands (3026 words)

	Past Peak: Tar Sands
		It is unlikely, however, that oil production from tar sands can reach the scale required to make a dent in world oil production quickly enough to make a real difference.
		Even if it could, though, there are other enormous problems with tar sands: production of oil from tar sands is extremely energy-intensive (so the net energy gain is low and the amount of carbon that goes into the atmosphere correspondingly large per unit of energy) and enormously destructive to the environment.
		The trouble is, Alberta's tar sands are nothing like conventional crude oil, which is why trade magazines and government agencies historically haven't taken tar sands into account when tallying up the world's reserves of crude.
	www.pastpeak.com /archives/2005/02/tar_sands.htm (1192 words)

	Tar Sands • The Coming Global Oil Crisis
		Alberta's oil sands comprise one of the world's two largest sources of bitumen; the other is in Venezuela.
		The Athabasca oil sands in northern Alberta contain an estimated 870 billion to 1.3 trillion barrels of oil -- an amount equal to or greater than all of the conventional oil extracted to date.
		Residents of northern Alberta have engaged in activist campaigns to close down the oil sands plants because of devastating environmental problems, including displacement of native people, destruction of boreal forests, livestock deaths, and an increase in miscarriages.
	www.oilcrisis.com /TarSands (749 words)

	NRDC Press Archive: Smithsonian to Host Industry-Sponsored Exhibit on Tar Sands Oil Production
		The Alberta tar sands are found under a region of boreal forest and wetlands larger than the state of Florida.
		Tar sands is a mixture of 85 percent sand, clay and silt; 5 percent water; and 10 percent bitumen -- a tar-like substance that can be converted to oil.
		The world's thirst for oil is leading to an unprecedented mining and drilling of the heavy oil, or bitumen, in the tar sands of Alberta's boreal forest in Canada, a destructive practice that looms as an environmental catastrophe of widespread proportions.
	www.nrdc.org /media/pressreleases/060607.asp (983 words)

	Tar Sands: Unconventional Oil Comes of Age -- An E&E Publishing Special Report (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
		Environmental challenges posed by massive operations that strip-mine forests and extract bitumen embedded in sand beneath are proving as vast as Alberta's tar sands region, an area the size of Florida.
		The removal of the bitumen from the sands and the use of tailings as the base of the ponds and lakes means the chemistry underground will be very different from the region's normal state, raising questions about water flows and their effects on native plants and species, they say.
		But tar sands are not a cheap or easy source for oil, and the scale of the project is immense.
	www.eenews.net /specialreports/tarsands/sr_tarsands2.htm (3037 words)

	Canada: Pinning hopes on the tar sand \| EnergyBulletin.net \| Peak Oil News Clearinghouse (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
		This year, the tar sands are projected to produce just over one million barrels a day on average — nearly equal to the 1.1 million barrels produced by conventional means.
		But the tar sands are a more complex energy proposition than a conventional field, in which oil trapped in porous rock is simply pumped to the surface.
		The sands are not just a source of energy; they're also a voracious consumer of energy in the form of natural gas — and in that capacity are competing with homeowners and industrial gas users who use natural gas both for heat and as a source of chemicals for products ranging from fertilizer to plastics.
	www.energybulletin.net /1191.html (2564 words)

	Tar Sands
		Tar sands are impregnated sands that yield mixtures of liquid hydrocarbon and require further processing other than mechanical blending before becoming finished petroleum products.
		Oil sands are deposits of bitumen; viscous oil that must be rigorously treated in order to convert it into an upgraded crude oil before it can be used in refineries to produce gasoline and other fuels.
		Developers are required to restore oil sand mining sites to at least the equivalent of their previous biological productivity; which is to say that the region as a whole forms an ecosystem and landscape that is as least as healthy and productive as the one that existed before it.
	ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu /102spring2002_Web_projects/M.Sexton (837 words)

	Alexander's Gas & Oil Connections - Could Canada's tar sands prove the ultimate anti-OPEC resource?
		For decades, they have been complaining that the official bean-counters have unfairly neglected the energy trapped in the Athabasca tar sands of Alberta-rock formations laced with hydrocarbons that can be mined and processed to yield barrels of oil.
		If the country's tar sands are ever to yield their bounty to the world's consumers, producers must overcome technical obstacles in three areas: complexity, cleanliness and cost.
		The result is that the bitumen separates from the sand, which sinks to the bottom.
	www.gasandoil.com /goc/news/ntn33230.htm (1518 words)

	Mining Automation, Oil & Gas, Electric Mining Shovels
		Tar sand is a mixture of oil and sand lying just beneath the surface of the earth.
		Today, the tar sand is used to produce synthetic crude oil and other oil products.
		In the refineries, the tar sand is mixed with warm water to separate the oil, called "bitumen," from the sand.
	www.sea.siemens.com /mining/case/mitarsand.html (566 words)

	Canada's tar sands industry is booming \| www.azstarnet.com ®
		Oil sands - also called tar sands - are found in an area almost half the size of Colorado spread across central Alberta, 240 miles northeast of Edmonton.
		Canada estimates the sands will yield as much as 175 billion barrels of oil, making it second only to Saudi Arabia in crude oil reserves and enough to satisfy U.S. demand for at least a generation.
		Separating oil from sand takes a lot of water, but oil sands proponents point out that other industries, including conventional oil and agriculture, also require lots of water.
	www.azstarnet.com /sn/printDS/96684 (477 words)

	Alberta Tar Sands
		The oil that is technologically retrievable today from Alberta's tar and oil sands is estimated at 280-300Gb (billion barrels).
		So, 110 kg of carbon in a barrel of oil produces (44/12)110 kg, or about 400 kg of CO Getting energy from tar* sands instead of light crude means emitting 80 kg extra for every 400 kg normally emitted, or about 20% more CO per unit of energy.
		Mining oil sands generates enormous volumes of liquid waste that are stored in toxic lakes that have concentrations of naturally occurring naphthenic acid, an odorless liquid used to help paint dry quickly.
	zfacts.com /p/218.html (1259 words)

	The Oil Sands Of Alberta, Where Black Gold And Riches Can Be Found In The Sand - CBS News
		They’re called oil sands, and if you’ve never heard of them then you’re in for a big surprise because the reserves are so vast in the province of Alberta that they will help solve America’s energy needs for the next century.
		The oil sands are buried under forests in Alberta that are the size of Florida.
		The oil sands have been in the ground for millions of years, but for decades, prospectors lost millions of dollars trying to squeeze the oil out of the sand.
	www.cbsnews.com /stories/2006/01/20/60minutes/main1225184.shtml (1002 words)

	.::dragonfire::. (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
		Tar sands like those in Alberta are regions of sand that contain oil – in large quantities and, for the U.S., close to home.
		By 2030, the tar sands will be producing at least five times as much as today, based on the most conservative government projections.
		Industry executives insist the pipeline is needed even without the tar sands, and it’s not fair to tie the two together.
	dfire.org /x2113.xml (3782 words)

	Athabasca Oil Sands - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		The Athabasca oil sands are named after the Athabasca River which cuts through the heart of the deposit, and traces of the heavy oil are readily observed on the river banks.
		The Athabasca oil sands are primarily located in and around the city of Fort McMurray which was still, in the late 1950s, primarily a wilderness outpost of a few hundred people whose main economic activities included fur trapping and salt mining.
		The Athabasca Oil Sands are now featured prominently in international trade talks, with energy rivals China and the United States both negotiating with Canada for a bigger share of the oil sands' rapidly increasing output.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Athabasca_Tar_Sands (3165 words)

	Oil Sands: The Costs of Alberta's "Black Gold" \| Worldwatch Institute
		Although Albertan oil sands extraction was not officially recognized as economically viable until 2003, production in the province more than doubled between 1995 and 2004, to 1.1 million barrels a day.
		Oil sands were historically known as “tar sands” because the oil occurs naturally in a tar-like form mixed with sand.
		The oil sands industry also uses large quantities of energy and produces massive amounts of waste water, known as “tailings.” Already, two toxic tailings dumps from Canadian oil sands mines are said to be visible from space with the naked eye.
	www.worldwatch.org /node/4222 (814 words)

	ASPO - The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas
		In 2003 the oil sands reserves were included in Canada’s estimated proven reserves, thus increasing from 5 to 180 billion barrels.
		The Canadian oil sands industry should be viewed as two separate forms of oil production, in situ production (similar to conventional oil production) and mining.
		The declining oil sands mining production may cause a peak production for the Canadian oil sands industry as a whole, since it is uncertain if the in situ production may compensate for the declining mining activities.
	www.peakoil.net /TarSand.html (312 words)

	FuturePundit: On Oil Tar Sands Production Costs
		Extraction of oil from the tar sands of Alberta Canada costs only $23 to $26 per barrel and so production is expanding rapidly.
		So, this little tar sand excercise (which is where this discussion originated in the first place) would only contribute to more GHG and CO2 emissions and climate change.
		The oil sands are the single largest contributor to GHG emissions growth in Canada.
	www.futurepundit.com /archives/003515.html (7172 words)

	Oil Sands: Interesting Thing of the Day
		Once separated from the sand and minerals, the crude oil is sometimes referred to as heavy oil, though that term is often used interchangeably with “oil sands” or “tar sands” as well.
		Most of the oil sands are not on or near the surface of the ground; workers must sometimes dig 200 feet (61m) or more to reach the deposits.
		Once the sand and water are removed, the bitumen must be processed further under high heat to remove impurities and break it down into a more useful and smoother-flowing oil.
	itotd.com /articles/233/oil-sands (1304 words)

	Wired 12.07: The Trillion-Barrel Tar Pit
		Here the sands are pulverized, then sent to cyclofeeders to be mixed with hot water and pumped to gargantuan centrifuges where the oil-rich component, bitumen, is separated out.
		It's a laborious process, to say the least - 2 tons of sand yields just one barrel of oil - but nowhere near as painstaking as it used to be.
		The conveyor belts that carried oil sands from dragline to processing plant were prone to cracking.
	www.wired.com /wired/archive/12.07/oil.html (1151 words)

	Sierra Club Compass: Tar Nation
		Already the largest supplier of foreign crude to the U.S., Canada is ramping up mining of its prodigious tar sands to slake America's (and the world's) ever-increasing thirst for oil.
		As has been noted here before, Ottawa is committed, under the climate treaty, to a six per cent reduction in emissions from 1990 levels by 2012.
		Actual emissions have in fact risen by 30 per cent, and the mining of tar sands is the main contributor to that increase.
	www.sierraclub.org /compass/2006/05/tar-nation.asp (291 words)

	NRDC Press Archive: Alberta Tar Sands Feed U.S. Addiction to Oil
		WASHINGTON (June 30, 2006) -- The annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival, opening today on the national mall, features an exhibit touting the mining of oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, a marked departure from the festival's traditional celebration of culture and diversity, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
		The exhibit is being sponsored by the Alberta provincial government and many of Canada's biggest energy companies, whose champions also are in Washington this week to promote U.S. investment in Canadian tar sands oil development.
		Although still in its infancy, the mining and drilling of tar sands already is Canada's fastest growing contribution to global warming.
	www.nrdc.org /media/pressreleases/060630.asp (461 words)

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