The Great Oil Sands Journey Part 1

From waves to wells to wheels to winds

Next time you fill up your car to drive from Winnipeg to Waterloo, take a moment to ponder the full journey. Not your journey – the journey of your fuel, starting from the oil sands. Actually, let’s go further than that, beginning before the oil sands, when oil was just a sparkle on an oceanic wave.

Waves to Wells
Part one of a five-part series

In the beginning, and we’re talking hundreds of millions of years ago, the remains of tiny plants and animals, mainly algae, were buried in sea beds. As they became more deeply buried, they began to heat up at temperatures between 50 and 150 degrees, eventually turning into liquid hydrocarbons, sulphur compounds, CO2 and water. Some of the liquid hydrocarbons included “light” compounds, others included “heavy” compounds and the rest contained everything in between.

Next time you start to feel impatient when you’re stuck behind a slow driver, imagine how long it would have taken for this viscous oil to migrate from strata beneath the western sea, eastward and upward through 100 kilometers of rock until finally reaching and saturating the large expanses of sand and sandstones that we now know as Alberta’s oil sands. We’re talking about 50 million years.

Enter the bacteria who are, at once, the heroes and the villains of the natural world. Sadly, the heroic nature of bacteria, which are being tested in new technologies today to create biofuels, improve oil sand extraction efficiency, speed up tailings pond reclamation and to upgrade heavy oils into lighter, cleaner burning fuels underground, is for another story.

This particular story, on the origins of the oil sands, is about how the hungry bacteria feasted on the lighter hydrocarbons first, leaving the heavier ones and metal compounds that cannot be digested behind. To this day, oil sands bitumen contains the more heavy hydrocarbons, which is why they receive so much attention. It requires more energy to transform the carbon heavy bitumen from the oil sands into fuel for your car than it does to transform conventional crude. And, often, more energy equals more greenhouse gas emissions, particularly when the energy used is natural gas.

On the plus side, however, Canada’s oil sands are vast and bountiful, fueling not only North America’s planes, trains and automobiles, but our bustling economy as well. Who knew such tiny little critters bobbing aimlessly in the ocean would have such a huge ripple effect on how we power our lives today?

Next week: Wells to Wheels – Do I have to separate you three?