Oil and Gas Industry in Canada
What are some reasons you can give for why Canada is one of the largest users of energy in the world?
- Climate, population density and distribution (transportation), advanced industrial economy, energy is cheap so we waste
- Conventional Energy Sources: well-established methods such as oil, natural gas, coal, hydro, and nuclear electricity (responsible for almost all of the energy used in Canada)
- Alternative Energy Sources: newer methods like solar, wind, and biomass energy
- 1 joule is a very small amount of energy, so gigajoule (GJ, one billion joules) and petajoule (PJ, one million joules) are used
- Don’t write down, but go over page 322 text and fig. 25-1 in textbook
- The Creation of Oil and Gas: generally found together in the environment
- How do you think oil/gas formed, and when did this forming first start?
- Hundreds of millions of years ago, when areas of Canada were covered by shallow oceans, as sea life and plants died they would fall to the sea floor
- Over millions of years, the dead plants and animals accumulated in thick layers, and were eventually covered by layers of sand and silt
- The immense weight of all the layers compressed the lower layers into sedimentary rock, and then from bacterial action, heat, and pressure the layers of animals and plants converted into oil and gas
- Often found in anticlinal traps
- Dome-shaped structure of rock layers created by folding, in which oil and gas are often trapped between layers of non-porous rock
- How do you think oil/gas formed, and when did this forming first start?
- Finding oil and gas can be very difficult, because deposits can be located many hundreds of metres below the surface. Some strategies geologists have designed to help find them are:
- Looking for surface rocks that contain traces of oil
- Looking for fossils in sedimentary rock that could indicate the right conditions needed for creating gas and oil
- Conducting seismic surveys (using shock waves to locate oil and gas bearing rock structures)
- In order to find and acquire oil and gas, drilling into the earth is needed
- Long process (may continue for months)
- Can result in no oil or gas being found (dry hole), oil and gas being found but in quantities too small to justify transporting the gas to a market (well is plugged and re-evaluated later), or that the deposit of gas or oil is large enough to develop
- Flowing Wells: these wells have enough natural pressure to force the oil or gas to the surface, where the flow is controlled by a series of valves called a “Christmas tree”
- Non-Flowing Wells: if there is not enough pressure to make the oil or gas flow to the surface, electric- or gas-powered pumps must be used (nodding horse or grasshopper machine)
- Secondary Recovery: as oil is removed, it becomes increasingly more difficult to remove more oil, and thus secondary recovery strategies have been incorporated
- Still, only about 60% of the oil in most deposits is removed
- Alberta is the biggest developer of oil and gas, with Saskatchewan and B.C. producing both but in less quantities
- Oil from the ground can take the form of either conventional crude oil, or synthetic crude oil created from Oil Sand
- Oil Sand: sand that is coated in an oil-like substance (Bitumen), which is easily dug up and can then be processed to separate the bitumen from the sand (found largely in Alberta)