The Athabasca Oil Sands in Alberta, Canada now cover roughly 100 square miles (258 square kilometers). The facility has expanded as its production of oil increased since the 1990s - an average of 3.1 million barrels were extracted each day in 2018, which is four times as much as in 2005. Athabasca contains Earth’s largest known deposit of bitumen, a semi-solid form of crude oil that occurs as a mixture of sand, clay, and water. The additional energy required to mine and then remove the sand from

The Kearl oil sands mine, operated by Imperial Oil and located about 70 kilometers north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, is one of Canada’s largest open-pit mining operations. Fully operational since 2013, Kearl produces bitumen from the Athabasca oil sands, which is later upgraded into synthetic crude oil. With an estimated resource base exceeding 4 billion barrels, Kearl is designed for decades of production and a capacity of roughly 240,000 barrels per day. Imperial continues to invest in reducing