In situ: the next generation for oil production

Oil sands projects are groundbreaking in the attempts to reach ‘inaccessable’ crude

Canada's oil sands can rightly be described as the world’s largest engineering play, and a testing ground for new technologies and ideas to recover more than 1 trillion barrels of previously inaccessible crude. The challenge has always been to improve recovery factors from what was previously considered unrecoverable oil. More than 80% of the oil-sands resource will be developed in situ, or in the reservoir, though that method only accounts for half of Alberta’s present oil-sands production of 1.9 million barrels per day (b/d). The oil sands are different from conventional oil, in that the bitumen does not move of its own accord. An external energy source is required to mobilise inert bitume