There is a huge, productive oil sand field in northern Alberta, Canada. The Athabasca River, where the oil sands are clearly visible from the river banks, is where the oil sands’ name derives from. Here in Alberta, Canada and Venezuela, there are a third of the world’s oil sands. Since they are so close to the surface and are easily accessible by surface mining, the Athabasca oil sands field is unusual. Athabasca is now the world’s top supplier of oil sands because mining is now much cheaper as a result.
Oil sands, also referred to as tar sands, are an inert form of oil. They are constructed of bitumen-coated clay and sand. It takes heating bitumen oil to make it flow because it is so thick. Oil sands are therefore very heavy and sticky. There is some water in the oil sands. As a result, they become sticky in the summer and rock-like in the winter when the water is frozen.
The simplest and most popular method of mining for oil sands is strip mining. We just need to dig a big pit and strip mine. The oil sands can then be removed from the ground by bulldozers and large trucks. The oil sands are loaded onto the trucks, where we mix them with water. By doing so, the clumps are broken up and the oil sands are transformed into a slurry, which is a more liquid substance. The oil sands can be transported to a plant via pipelines when they are converted into a slurry. The oil is taken from the sand at the plant and sent to a refinery for processing. Synthetic oil and other petroleum products can be made from the crude oil in this location.
Strip mining isn’t really an option when deeper oil sands fields are encountered. To get to the oil sands, we must dig farther. With the oil sands being extremely sticky and having the potential to be solid or nearly solid, it is easy to see how this might present a problem. We can inject water into the ground to solve this issue. Oil sands become underground slurry when they are combined with water. This makes simply pumping it out to extract it much simpler. Pumping oxygen into the reserve is an additional form of extraction. In a controlled manner, the oxygen is set ablaze, and the bitumen is melted down to a liquid state. The oil sands may then be pumped out.
In some cases, the tar pits that oil sands can create on the surface help us locate the locations of these deposits. When the pitch and tar rise to the surface and separate from the sand, tar pits are created. Prehistoric animals that got trapped in these pitch tar pits are well known for being almost perfectly preserved in them. The La Brea Tar Pit in California is the most well-known tar pit. Trinidad has a different well-known tar pit. This tar pit is about the size of a lake and could be 250 feet deep. It’s thought to be right on top of an earthen fault line.