Alternate Fuel-Sand Oil

Alternate Fuel.

Oil sands also called tar sands consist of bitumen which is soluble organic matter derived from degradation of oil either as seeps that come to surface or within shallow subsurface reservoirs and host sediment with associated minerals, excluding any related natural gas.
Today the largest single oil sand deposit in the World is the Athabasca oil sands located in northeastern Alberta, Canada. Here the shallow oil sands are recovered in open-pit mines by truck-and-shovel operations in which the World’s largest Caterpillar 797 and 797B trucks have payloads of 380 tons. The oil sand is transported to processing plants, where hot or warm water separates the bitumen from the sand, followed by dilution with lighter hydrocarbons and upgrading to synthetic crude oil.
It is proposed to flow the semi-liquid to USA from Alberta to Port Arthur in Texas
by a 1700 long special pipeline at an estimated cost of 7 billion US $.

Besides  the environmental impact from spills, it takes an enormous amount of electrical energy to extract the oil from the tar sand. This not only affects the cost, it also increases the greenhouse gas emissions to generate the required electrical power.