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Fort McMurray
At a
Glance
Location: 435 Km northeast of Edmonton on Highway 63
Population: 64,441- city and 79,810 - Municipality
Average Temperature: January -19.8 C July +16.6
Annual Rainfall: 334.5 mm
Annual Snowfall: 172.0 cm
Hours of Sunshine/Year 2108.9
Elevation: 370 m
Industries: Oil sands, natural gas and pipeline sectors,
forestry, tourism, retail
The largest city in
'Athabasca oil sands country' is Fort McMurray, which is in
the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo. With the
petroleum industry as prominent as it is locally, it should
come as no surprise that the city's slogan is "We
have the Energy!"
The sands in which the
oil is trapped is called bitumen. What is Bitumen?
Oil sands are a mixture of sand, water, clay and bitumen. Bitumen
naturally occurs along the river banks and in the Athabasca River
area. Bitumen is oil that is too heavy or thick to flow or be pumped
without being diluted or heated – at 11 degrees Celsius bitumen is
as hard as a hockey puck. Canada’s oil sands are found in three
deposits – Fort Mc Murray, Peace River and Cold Lake areas in
Alberta and part of Saskatchewan. The greatest quantity is found in
the Athabasca deposit.The oil sands are sometimes called tar sands.
Mining Bitumen
There are two different methods of producing oil from the oil sands:
open-pit mining and in situ (Latin, meaning "in place"). Bitumen
that is close to the surface is mined. Bitumen that occurs deep
within the ground is produced in situ using specialized extraction
techniques.
Open Pit Mining
Open-pit mining is similar to many coal mining operations – large
shovels scoop the oil sand into trucks that then take it to crushers
where the large clumps of earth are broken down. This mixture is
then thinned out with water and transported to a plant, where the
bitumen is separated from the other components and upgraded to
create synthetic oil. This technique is sometimes misrepresented as
the only method of mining oil sands. Just 20 per cent of the oil
sands are recoverable through open-pit mining.
In Situ Drilling
80 per cent of oil sands reserves (which underlie approximately 97
per cent of the oil sands surface area) are recoverable through in
situ technology, with limited surface disturbance.
Advances in technology, such as directional drilling, enable in situ
operations to drill multiple wells (sometimes more than 20) from a
single location, further reducing the surface disturbance.
The majority of in situ operations use steam-assisted gravity
drainage, or SAGD. This method involves pumping steam underground
through a horizontal well to liquefy the bitumen that is then pumped
to the surface through a second well.
The Issues: Environmental
Impacts
Our industry understands that Canadians are concerned about the
impacts of our work, and expect that industry will manage the
resource responsibly.
The oil sands have generated much public debate, and with that, some
misinformation. It’s important to separate fact and fiction and to
have a balanced conversation about oil sands development. There are
a number of environmental issues in the oil sands, all of which
require a commitment to technology and innovation to overcome.
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