“100 Years of Excellence” Natural Resources Canada and the Oil Sands

Natural Resources Canada has a long relationship with the oil sands of northern Alberta. The oil sands are unique in Canada’s — and the world’s — energy picture. The region currently produces about one million barrels a day, and output is expected to nearly double by 2010 and possibly triple by 2015, making the area one of the largest oil fields in the world.

Developing this special resource presents special challenges. Complex and energy-intensive technologies are required at every step: from extracting the oil sands from their deposits; to separating the bitumen — a sticky, semi-solid mixture of organic liquids — from the sand; to upgrading the bitumen to synthetic crude oil, which only then can be converted into useable liquid fuels.

Natural Resources Canada has been closely involved with the development of the oil sands since they were first discovered and their importance was recognized. A hundred years ago, in 1907, an Act of Parliament established the Department of Mines, which combined the Mines Branch with the Geological Survey of Canada. The Mines Branch’s Fuels and Fuels Testing Division and its direct descendants — up to the present-day CANMET Energy Technology Centre (CETC) — have led the way in the development of Canadian oil sands and the corresponding specialized heavy oil technologies.

Production of liquid fuels from the oil sands soon became one of the principal areas of the new Fuels Division. But interest in oil sands technology didn’t take off until during the Second World War, when Canadian production of conventional crude oil started to decline. Soon after the war, in 1948, a major pilot program was launched at the Fuels Testing Division’s laboratory on Booth Street in Ottawa to examine the processing of bitumen from sand separation to commercial production.

Fuels Division scientists foresaw that the price of conventional oil would reach such levels that the standard method of upgrading bitumen by removing carbon would soon become economically unfeasible. They proceeded to develop a more efficient process known as hydrocracking in which hydrogen is added to the bitumen under pressure. The resulting method continues to be known as the CANMET Hydrocracking Process, and the Bitumen Hydrocracking Pilot Plant Facility is still operating today.

Today, process development work is centred in the CETC’s Devon Research Centre in Devon, Alberta, about 20 kilometres southwest of Edmonton in the heart of Alberta's oil refining industries. The work conducted there has two main focuses: developing sustainable technologies to extract and upgrade bitumen, and mitigating environmental impacts. The Centre comprises two major science and technology research groups: the National Centre for Upgrading Technology (NCUT), which specializes in upgrading or refining oil sands bitumen, and Advanced Separation Technologies (AST), which develops new, less energy-intensive methods for recovering bitumen and other petroleum products from oil sands.