Bitumen

As population increases and the standard of living improves, there is more demand for energy. Due to this growth and the decrease in reserves of conventional oil, over the past few years, unconventional forms of oil including oil sands have become a great global provider of energy. Oil sands - also known as tar sands - are mixtures of sand, water, clay and bitumen. With the largest deposit located in Canada, tar sands are found in several places around the globe, including Venezuela, the United States, and Russia (Rudzinski, n.d). Through open-pit mining and in-situ, tar sands are mined and then processed and changed to crude oil and petroleum products. However, are tar sand operations worth sacrificing the planet? Despite the energy supply…

Perhaps one of the most widely debated topics, in recent years, is the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. The completion of the project has been done in multiple phases and one of the last phases scheduled to be completed is the phase 4 extension. This extension would create a pipeline that would trek, around 2000 miles, from Alberta Canada to the gulf coast of Texas (Friends of the Earth). Since the pipeline would cross international borders, approval from congress would be necessary in…

Oil is usually found deep under ground, but the greater Los Angeles area up through the Santa Barbara area is one of a few places in the world where oil is not just close to the surface, it is on the surface, bubbling in cold pits of bitumen, also known as asphalt and tar. This asphaltum has been important to humans for as long as they have lived in the region. In the past it was primarily used to waterproof boats, water carriers, and cooking vessels or as an adhesive. Now, of course we use…

The difficulty of mining oil sands varies depending on the location of the oil sands. Oil sands deposits that are less than about 250 feet below the surface can be removed using conventional strip-mining methods. The strip-mining process includes removal of the overburden, excavation of the resource, and transportation to a processing facility. Nearly all mined bitumen is currently upgraded to synthetic crude oil. Oil sands extraction processes are generally divided into two categories: mining…

Sublime Industry and Risky Aesthetics: A Comparison of Edward Burtynsky’s OIL and Karen Solie’s “Bitumen” Karen Solie’s poem “Bitumen” (2015) and Edward Burtynsky’s photography collection OIL (2009) both question the adequacy of sublime aesthetics as a representational mode for depicting the effects of industry. I will explore how the oil industry is represented as sublime in Burtynsky’s OIL and the critical and ironic distance this representation requires. Informing this will be historical…

Introduction This supply chain case study is focusing on the Bitumen Cocoa organisation in Zaria Nigeria. In the past decades, numbers of products offered to the market have generally exploded. The cocoa product lifetime has decreased hugely. The combination of these two trends leads to increased inaccuracy of the demand uncertainty resulting the increase in inventory levels. However, the disadvantages of holding inventory have been increasingly recognised with the regard to impact this may…

Froth Treatment: Oil Sands Bitumen Recovery Introduction This description will give you an understanding of the fundamentals behind the Bitumen Froth Treatment process, as performed at Naphthenic Froth Treatment (NFT) operating sites. Bitumen is the valuable hydrocarbon component of the ore formation which begins in the ground, and is extracted by the Mining department. Prior to entering the Froth Treatment facility, the Bitumen Froth is created by mixing the ore with hot water for…

Canadian oil boom Great or Horrible “It a choice between starving or being poisoned” says a local doctor The canadian oil boom is the canadian companies are using oil sands to make oil and it is very poisonous.Canadian oil boom profitable but dangerous these are some things you may ask What are oil sands?What’s crude oil?Where did they come from? So you may ask what are oil sands? According to www.enr.gov.nt.ca Oil sands are a mixture of sand, water, clay and bitumen. Bitumen is oil that…

of bituminous mixture such as Stability, Flow, Voids in Total mix (VTM), Voids Filled with Bitumen and (VFB) highly depend on the physical properties of aggregates. This study conducted by observing the effect of flakiness & elongated index by adding different percentages from 0% to 50% of flaky & elongated aggregates of different sieve with required quantity to the bituminous mixes. The method of Marshall Mix design is adopted for this purpose. The change in rotation angle of coarse aggregate…

bitumen and has the consistency of tar (R. v. Syncrude Canada Ltd.) A bird’s feathers are aligned in such a way that they keep water from soaking between them. When a bird becomes oiled their feathers will separate altering their original waterproof alignment. Due to the matting of the bird’s feathers water will now be able reach the birds sensitive skin and could potentially lead to hypothermia (International Bird Rescue, 2015). Another adverse affect of oil on the birds is that their natural…