page_title: Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin
section_title: Oil sands
hierarchical_section_title: Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin / Oil sands
caption_attribution_description: English: This is a picture of Syncrude's base mine. The yellow structures are the bases of pyramids made of sulphur - it is not economical for Syncrude to sell the sulphur so it stockpiles it instead. Behind that is the tailings pond, held in by what is recognized as the largest dam in the world. The extraction plant is just to the right of this photograph and most of the mine is to the left. Deutsch: Tagebau der Syncrude Canada Ltd. zur Gewinnung der Athabasca-Ölsande im Nordosten von Alberta, Kanada. Die gelben Gebilde sind Schwefelhalden. Der Schwefel entstammt dem im Ölsand enthaltenen Asphalt und wird dort gelagert, weil es unwirtschaftlich ist, ihn zu verkaufen. Dahinter befindet sich ein Absetzbecken für Schlämme aus der Ölsandaufbereitung (engl.: tailings pond). Das Werk, in dem die Extraktion des Asphalts stattfindet, ist unmittelbar rechts außerhalb des Bildes, während sich der größte Teil des Tagebaus links außerhalb des Bildes befindet.
context_page_description: The Western Canada Sedimentary Basin is a vast sedimentary basin underlying 1,400,000 square kilometres of Western Canada including southwestern Manitoba, southern Saskatchewan, Alberta, northeastern British Columbia and the southwest corner of the Northwest Territories. It consists of a massive wedge of sedimentary rock extending from the Rocky Mountains in the west to the Canadian Shield in the east. This wedge is about 6 kilometres thick under the Rocky Mountains, but thins to zero at its eastern margins. The WCSB contains one of the world's largest reserves of petroleum and natural gas and supplies much of the North American market, producing more than 16,000,000,000 cubic feet per day of gas in 2000. It also has huge reserves of coal. Of the provinces and territories within the WCSB, Alberta has most of the oil and gas reserves and almost all of the oil sands.
context_section_description: According to the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board (EUB, now known as the Alberta Energy Regulator, the AER), Alberta's oil sands areas contain an ultimately recoverable crude bitumen resource of 50 billion cubic metres (315 billion barrels), with remaining established reserves of almost 28 billion cubic metres (174 billion barrels) at year-end 2004.
  The Athabasca Oil Sands, the Cold Lake Oil Sands and the Peace River Oil Sands, which contain initial oil-in-place reserves of 260 billion cubic metres (1.6 trillion barrels), an amount comparable to the total world reserves of conventional oil. The World Energy Council reported (2007) that the three Alberta oil sands areas contain at least two-thirds of the world's discovered bitumen in place. These three major oil sands areas, all in Alberta, have reserves that dwarf those of the conventional oil fields. By 2007 the Alberta natural bitumen deposits were the source of over one third of the crude oil produced in Canada.
  As a result of the oil price increases since 2003, the number of major mining, upgrading and thermal in-situ projects has grown to some 46 existing and proposed projects, encompassing 135 project expansion phases in various stages of execution. Estimates of capital expenditures to construct all announced projects over the period 2006 to 2015 total $125 billion. According to a Statistics Canada 2006 report, this extremely high level of activity has caused a severe labor shortage in Alberta and driven unemployment rates to their lowest level in history – the lowest of all 10 Canadian provinces and 50 U.S. states. This is the main factor limiting growth of oil sands production in the WCSB.
caption: Mine at the Athabasca Oil Sands
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