Environmental Impacts of Oil Sands Development in Alberta

The oil sands are an issue of global importance. As conventional sources of crude oil are depleted, unconventional sources of oil, such as the bitumen found in oil sands, play a larger role in offsetting declining conventional production. The Canadian oil sands are the second largest proven oil reserve after Saudi Arabia.

Most of the Canadian oil sands are located in Alberta, with 175 billion barrels of recoverable bitumen underlying approximately 140,800 square kilometres of the province,2 an area that is roughly the size of the state of Florida. This unconventional oil is currently extracted using surface mining or in situ (in place) drilling methods, depending on the depth of the deposit. Mining is used for the bitumen that is closer to the surface (less than 75 metres), and drilling for in situ extraction is used when the bitumen is more than 75 metres deep.3 Each extraction method presents its own challenges.

As the rate and scale of oil sands development increases, concerns about the associated environmental impacts have grown. The Pembina Institute has been reporting on these concerns and providing factual information on the environmental impacts since the release of its Oil Sands Fever report in 2005.

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