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Athabasca bitumen sits in sand near the surface. It is strip-mined, washed out with hot water, and then either upgraded on site into a synthetic crude or thinned with condensate and pipelined south. It is the clearest place where the mining industry and the oil industry are the same industry.
- Malzeme
- Oil Sands & Bitumen
- Çeşit
- Bitumen in sand, roughly 8° API, 10–12% bitumen by weight
- Nereden başlıyor
- Canada — The Athabasca deposit, northern Alberta
Adım adım ve sınırdan sınıra
Canada · Athabasca, Alberta elinde Oil sands operators (Madenci)
A mine, in every sense
Overburden is stripped and the oil sand is loaded by electric shovel into 400-tonne haul trucks. The ore grade is quoted in percent bitumen exactly as a copper mine quotes percent copper.
Neden burada: Shallow deposits only. Where the bitumen is too deep to mine, steam is injected instead and it is produced through wells.
Canada · Extraction plant elinde Oil sands operators (Madenci)
Washing the oil off the sand
The sand is slurried in hot water and agitated. Bitumen floats to the top as a froth; sand and clay sink and go to the tailings pond.
Geri kalanına ne oldu: About 890 tonnes of sand, clay and water per 1,000 tonnes mined goes to tailings. Managing that residue is the defining environmental question of the whole industry.
Neden burada: Hot-water separation only works on mined ore, and the ore is too heavy to ship anywhere. The plant is beside the mine because it has to be.
Canada · Upgrader, or a diluent blending terminal elinde Operators and midstream companies (Rafineri)
Upgrade here, or dilute and send it south
An upgrader cokes and hydrotreats the bitumen into synthetic crude oil of about 31° API. The alternative is to blend in roughly 30% condensate to make dilbit, which can be pipelined but arrives as somebody else's refining problem.
Geri kalanına ne oldu: Upgrading rejects carbon as petroleum coke — millions of tonnes of it are stockpiled in Alberta because there is no local market.
Neden burada: Upgrading in Alberta keeps the conversion value in Canada; diluting exports it. The same decision the Venezuelan route faces, with the same trade-off.
United States · To the US Midwest and Gulf Coast elinde Pipeline operators (Tüccar)
1,500 km of pipeline
Pumped south. The condensate in dilbit is separated at the refinery and railed or piped back north to be used again.
Neden burada: Alberta is landlocked. Pipeline capacity, not geology, is what has capped this industry's growth for two decades.
United States · US Midwest refineries elinde Refiner (Rafineri)
Refined into fuel
Midwest refineries were rebuilt specifically to run this heavy Canadian barrel, which is why it trades at a discount to lighter crude but has a dependable home.
Neden burada: A refinery configured for heavy crude cannot easily switch to light, and vice versa. Refineries and crude grades marry each other for decades.
Bu çalışılmış bir örnektir. Belirtilen bir başlangıç miktarını, yayımlanmış tipik verim ve geri kazanım oranları üzerinden takip eder; dolayısıyla oranlar doğrulanabilir niteliktedir; belirli bir sevkiyatın kaydı değildir. Güzergâh bilgileri — hangi ülkeler, hangi işlemler ve malzemenin neden başka bir yerde işlenemeyeceği — kamuya açık raporlardan derlenmiştir.