The Athabasca oil sands (as known as tar sands) are the largest of its kind in the world. They produce oil, much of which is exported to the United States. In fact, the US imports more oil from Canada than any other country.

• Heated water from the Athabasca River is used to separate oil from tar sands. It can take up two tons of tar sands and four barrels of water to produce one barrel of oil. (Source)
• After the process, the water is too dirty to go back in the river, and it’s stored in vast “tailings ponds,” which can be as big as the mines.
• Since the 1960s, energy companies have been digging open-pit mines to get at tar sands.
• 1,600 ducks died after landing in a tailings pond run by a company called Syncrude.
• Oil companies burn vast amounts of natural gas to boil the water to steam the oil sands. At its Christina Lake facility, Cenovus uses about 750 cubic feet of natural gas for every barrel of oil it steams out of the ground.

Source

Here’s a bonus five Friday facts:

The following figures come from Great Britain’s The Independent (2007)

• Producing crude oil from the tar sands … generates up to four times more carbon dioxide, the principal global warming gas, than conventional drilling.
• The booming oil sands industry will produce 100 million tonnes of CO2 (equivalent to a fifth of the UK’s entire annual emissions) a year by 2012
• Tar sands facility will be capable of producing 200,000 barrels of crude a day by 2020. In return for a half share of Husky’s Sunrise field in the Athabasca region of Alberta, the epicentre (sic) of the tar sands industry, BP has sold its partner a 50 per cent stake in its Toledo oil refinery in Ohio. The companies will invest $5.5bn (2.7) in the project, making BP one of the biggest players in tar sands extraction.
• Canada claims that it has 175 billion barrels of recoverable oil in Alberta, making the province second only to Saudi Arabia in proved oil riches and sparking a 50bn “oil rush”
• Despite production costs per barrel of up to 15 dollars, compared to 1 per barrel in Saudi Arabia, the Canadian province expects to be pumping five million barrels of crude a day by 2030.

[Image source: Metropolitan Museum of Art]