It's actually a filthy mixture of bitumen, sand, heavy metals and toxic organic chemicals.
However, for Canada and Alberta, the oil sands industry involves major environmental issues on many fronts which must be addressed as a high priority".3p293 Sprawling across much of northern Alberta's boreal forest under an area a little smaller than the U.S. state of Illinois lies a valuable blend of bitumen, sand, minerals, and other materials.
Although there was no clear explanation for dependency of PM10 with NO2 in this study area, we can speculate that NO2 from vehicular combustion emissions may be related to traffic particles such as tire wear, road bitumen, sand traction, and pavement aggregates that may increase concentrations of PM10 (Kupiainen et al. 2005).
In recent years, electrospray ionization (ESI) coupled with Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FT-ICR MS) has been widely applied for characterizing nitrogen compounds in crude oil and its distillates [11, 12, 13, 14, 15], oil bitumen sands [16], and shale oils [17, 18].
Oil sands are an alternative fossil fuel which is composed of 10 %–12 % (mass fraction) bitumen, 80% 85% % sand and clay and 3 %–5 % water (Painter et al. 2010; Xu et al. 2008).
At its laboratory in Calgary, the company's scientists are working on a spin container that could separate bitumen from sand and clay with almost no water, saving energy and alleviating the need to contain vast toxic waste in tailings ponds that pose a threat to wildlife and wetlands around mining sites.
This mine is located about 30 km north of the town of Fort McMurray (population ~50,000) in northeastern Alberta (about 800km north of Drumheller), and is one of the places where bitumen rich sand is mined and refined into various petroleum products.
There is reckoned to be 300 billion barrels' worth of oil here, greater than Saudi Arabia's proven oil reserves; if brought to market, it could fetch trillions of dollars.Ah, but there's the snag: extracting the oil from the tar-like bitumen (tar sands is what old lags call oil sands) is not as easy as sticking a pipe into the Saudi desert.
Another Edwards company, Canadian Natural Resources, has plans to spend $25bn to turn the bitumen-bearing sand found in northern Alberta into barrels of crude oil.
The bitumen-rich sand is removed, mixed with water into a slurry, and spun in centrifuges until the oil is separated, leaving behind vast black tailings ponds that are hazardous to wildlife.
Multi-spectral high resolution imagery data from SPOT5 and RapidEye were used for extraction and quantification of the anthropogenic and natural changes for a case study of Alberta bitumen (oil sands) mining located in the Western Boreal Plains near Fort McMurray, Canada.
