Oil Sands

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Recommended: Importance of oil in the world

Oil is a resource humans use in their everyday life. It is found everywhere, whether it’s a child’s lunch in a plastic container or the gasoline for your vehicle. People rely on oil to help them in their daily life. Oil is practically in everything. Surprisingly, oil has a part of producing clothing, if you backtrack to the machines that were used to make them they were most likely running on oil or even the dyes that gave the vibrant colors to your outfit are made out of oil. So, how are we going to get all the oil? The Alberta Oil Sands (also known as the Tar Sands) are large deposits of bitumen and extremely heavy crude oil. They are located near the Athabasca River. The sands have an area over 40,000km2 (Data from 2009); which is larger than Vancouver Island. The deposits in Canada are the second largest after Saudi Arabia’s. The Athabasca deposits are the largest known crude bitumen deposits in the world. Out of the three major oil deposits in Alberta, it stands on top. The one thing that they don’t stand on top of is being environmentally friendly. The environment is a major issue and many have been trying to stop the development of the oil sands. The land of Alberta is destroyed, as the open pit mining is the oil way to extract the crude oil from the ground. Open-pit mining is mining technique in a way where you blast rock in order to create a huge borrow/pit in the ground. This steals animal’s habitat and destroys the earth that could be use for agriculture. The boreal forest has been cleared for open-pit mines, this strips away 587 different species that are live in the province of Alberta. Caribou are chased out of their preferred habitat and are place in between road construction and their habitats being destroyed. The ...

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...ada Struggles to Provide Food Security for Northern Communities | Cultural Survival. Cultural Survivial Inc., 2013. Web. 09 Jan. 2014. .
D. "Fishing." Hello BC. Destination BC Corp., 2013. Web. 09 Jan. 2014. .
"Salmon Farming in British Columbia PDF." The University of British Columbia| Falculty of Law. The University of British Columbia, n.d. Web. 9 Jan. 2014. .
"Stakeholders Realtions (Oil Sands) Pdf." CBSR. Canadian Buisness for Social Responsibility, May 2009. Web. 9 Jan. 2014. .

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