Physics in the oil sands of Alberta (original) (raw)

The recent spike in the price of oil to over US$140 per barrel focused worldwide attention on the need for more diverse supplies of fuel from unconventional sources and renewable resources. The oil sands of Alberta, the largest source of unconventional fuel for North America, are also the largest petroleum deposit on Earth. Sometimes called tar sands, they contain an estimated 2.5 trillion barrels of crude oil over an area of more than 140 000 square kilometers, but that oil, called bitumen, is too viscous to be extracted by conventional drilling. Large oil-sands deposits also exist in Venezuela, and smaller ones are found in Utah, western Africa, and Russia, but production from the Canadian deposits is the largest. Material from a typical commercially viable oil-sands deposit is shown in figure 1. It contains 9%-13% bitumen, 3%-7% water, and 80%-85% mineral solids. Of the solids, 15%-30% are fine particles, predominantly clays, less than 44 μm in diameter. The challenge in production is to separate the bitumen not only from the sand grains but also from the micron-and submicron-sized clay particles. Alberta's

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