In early 2003, as part of its annual statistical review of the petroleum industry, the Oil and Gas Journal altered, profoundly, the ranking of oil-rich nations in the world. This involved raising the remaining proven oil reserves for Canada from a meager 4.9 billion bbls to an impressive 180 billion, making the country second only to Saudi Arabia (Fig. 1.1) and effectively reducing OPEC's total share of global reserves by 10%. Suddenly, an advanced, Western nation appeared among the top five oil countries for the first time in more than half a century. The great leap in Canadian reserves was due entirely to estimates of commercially recoverable bitumen from oil sand deposits, centered in the province of Alberta. "Commercially recoverable" is the key concept: technological innovation and cost-cutting measures implemented since the late 1980s have made a sizable portion of the supergiant oil sands resource accessible to profitable enterprise. Progress has been so impressive that some experts propose the level of recoverable reserves should be considered as high as 300 billion bbls.
展开▼
