Where the Oil Comes From

The media is focused on the undesired flow of oil from the leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico. That will be fixed. It will be expensive and take years.

But the real long term story is the production of oil in Alberta, Canada. This is where the Athabasca oil sands are located:

From the Alberta government web site:

Alberta’s oil sands underlie 140,200 km2 (54,132 square miles) of land in the Athabasca, Cold Lake and Peace River areas in northern Alberta. As of March 31, 2009, just 602 km2 are disturbed by oil sands mining, about the size of the City of Edmonton, which accounts for 0.3% of the oil sands area, or 0.1% of the total land area of Alberta. Together these oil sands areas contain an estimated 1.7 trillion barrels (initial volume in place) of crude bitumen. About 10% of this volume (170.4 billion barrels) is recoverable using current technology.

• Of the total 170.4 billion barrels remaining established reserves, about 80% is considered recoverable by in situ methods and 20% by surface mining methods. Oil sands within 75 meters of the surface can be mined. Oil sands below this threshold must be extracted using in situ methods, which do not utilize tailings ponds.


• As of August 2009, there were 91 active oil sands projects in Alberta. Of these, four were producing mining projects; the remaining projects used various in-situ recovery methods.


• Current upgrading capacity in Alberta is approximately 1,209,000 barrels per day (bbl/d) of bitumen with synthetic crude oil (SCO) output at approximately 1,037,500 bbl/d.

This puts the 78,000 barrels of oil per day that are spewing from the uncapped well in the Gulf of Mexico into perspective.

By the way... here is a 2006 CBS Sixty Minutes story on the Canadian oil sands...



Notice how Shell Oil's chief estimates there is 2 trillion barrels of oil in these Athabaska deposits.