New technique could double bitumen recovery rate

•Alberta’s oil sands underlie 140,200 km2 (54,132 square miles) of land in the Athabasca, Cold Lake and Peace River areas in northern Alberta. As of March 31, 2009, just 602 km2 are disturbed by oil sands mining, about the size of the City of Edmonton, which accounts for 0.3% of the oil sands area, or 0.1% of the total land area of Alberta. Together these oil sands areas contain an estimated 1.7 trillion barrels (initial volume in place) of crude bitumen. About 10% of this volume (170.4 billion barrels) is recoverable using current technology.

http://www.energy.gov.ab.ca/OilSands/791.asp#Geography

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