For context, Alberta oil sands have an energy ratio of about 4 to 1, meaning it takes one barrel of oil to produce 4 barrels. The world average is about 17 to 1 with your typical Saudi oil about 40:1. It's difficult to describe what this stuff is like if you haven't seen it. It's essentially a stiff tar that soaked into sand. One of the techniques for refining it (not sure if still used) consisted of importing good oil from the US to dilute it up to a minimum standard so it can be sold. A current technique like mentioned in the article is to heat up the formation with steam until it gets hot enough so that it starts to flow. They use natural gas to heat the steam, so it's essentially a scheme to turn natural gas into oil, but with pollution added to the mix.

What works for monitoring in other basins is obviously insufficient for the oil sands, so it's good to see the federal government funding these sorts of studies. It will likely lead to better monitoring and reporting regulations, but the Alberta government will likely scream that a Trudeau is trying to f** us over once again. The last time in the 80s was plain protectionism, while this is protectionism for a much better reason.

I love my province, but man, are we stupid sometimes.

The oil produced mostly gets shipped to the US, where we sell it at a discount because it's crappy quality. This in turns helps the US pollute more but save dollars in the process. Oil sands oil makes up about 14% of US oil consumption.

If I was dictator of Alberta, I wouldn't do anything to stop production, I would just make a law that any production energy has to come from renewable, non-carbon sources. It would generate a frenzy of research and development that hasn't been seen since the industrial revolution as people pant and salivate at all that money sitting in the ground. :)

I eventually decided I wouldn't work for oil companies any longer. If they want to do it, they'll have to do it without me. It has led me down a fun career path of working for companies I only dreamed about working for when I was in school.

Energy statistics by a partisan group, so numbers might be biased: https://sustainablesociety.com/research-material/oil-sands/

Energy stats worldwide: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...