Canada's Heavy Oil Drillers Left Twiddling Their Thumbs

摘要

In western Canada, there is more than one way to skin the heavy oil cat. For years, heavy oil drillers have thrived in the shadows of the oil sands industry, counterintuitively pumping sand into bitumen deposits in order to extract oil. Where the oil sands operators spend billions of dollars figuring out how to separate sand from bitumen, their lesser-known competitors - known as Cold Heavy Oil Production with Sands (Chops) - have created a valuable niche by essentially doing the opposite in a strand of heavy oil that straddles the border between Alberta and Saskatchewan.