What are Oil Sands?

Oil sands - also called "tar sands" - are a mixture of clay, water, sand, and bitumen. The bitumen is a thick, degraded form of oil that doesn't flow well because of its heavy viscosity. In other words, it is thick like tar - not thinner and flowing like most crude oil. However, bitumen can be strip-mined and turned into a synthetic crude oil or refined into a variety of petroleum products. There is a lot of it. Alberta is estimated to have 174 billion barrels of recoverable heavy oil. In comparison, Saudi Arabia's desert contains 260 billion barrels of traditional crude. Newer technologies have made it much easier to produce oil from the oil sands, and in 2004 more than one million barrels were being produced per day. The new goal is to produce five million barrels per day by 2030.