Engineering Challenges in the Design of Alberta’s Oil Sands Projects

Oil sand is found at locations around the globe, including Canada, the United States, Venezuela, and Russia. The Athabasca deposit in the Canadian province of Alberta is by far the largest and most developed site. Oil sand recovery procedures use advanced technologies developed over the past 40 years. The continuous improvements in oil sand recovery procedures have generated engineering and environmental challenges that are rarely encountered in other conventional oil and gas or petrochemical projects. The current economic climate and oil prices have boosted oil sand technology. As a result, several large-scale projects were launched within the last few years, to increase oil sand production in Alberta. The paper provides an overview of some of the engineering challenges encountered in such projects. A brief introduction is presented for the common procedures used to recover oil sand in Alberta. The author would like to share with the readers the difficulties and solutions used to resolve these challenges that are not addressed by North American codes or European codes of practice.