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Record W4240681973 · doi:10.2118/156676-pa

Water Use in Canada's Oil-Sands Industry: The Facts

2013· article· en· W4240681973 on OpenAlexaffabout
Stuart Lunn

Bibliographic record

VenueSPE Economics & Management · 2013
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldChemistry
TopicPetroleum Processing and Analysis
Canadian institutionsImperial Oil (Canada)
Fundersnot available
KeywordsOil sandsEnvironmental scienceAsphaltPetroleum industrySteam-assisted gravity drainageProductivityUnconventional oilGroundwaterHydrology (agriculture)GeologyFossil fuelEnvironmental engineeringWaste managementGeographyArchaeologyEngineeringGeotechnical engineering

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Summary Canada's oil-sands industry is often perceived as having poor environmental performance. One focus area is the use of water for oilsands production. Bitumen from oil sands is produced by surface mining or by in-situ thermal extraction. Both technologies are water-based. The oil-sands deposits are situated in northern Alberta, where the river basins have 87% of the provincial average annual water supply but only have 13% of the demand. Oil-sands operators have made significant progress in improving freshwater use productivity (intensity), and water use represents a small percentage of natural supply. For in-situ production, the 2010 freshwater use productivity for the industry was 0.43 units of freshwater per unit of bitumen produced. As an example of continuous improvement, the Imperial Oil Cold Lake in-situ oil-sands operation has improved freshwater use productivity by 90% since 1985 through produced-water recycling and the use of deep saline groundwater. The in-situ oil-sands industry will remain a relatively small water user into the future (2030) using an estimated 0.04 to 0.09% of available supply from the three river basins where it is situated. For oil-sands mining, most of the source water comes from the Athabasca River. The average water-use productivity for oil-sands production between 2006 and 2011 was 2.5 units of Athabasca River water per unit of bitumen and synthetic crude oil produced (3.6 for all freshwater sources). In 2011, the oil-sands mining industry used 0.54% of the annual Athabasca River flow and 3% of the lowest 2011–2012 winter weekly flow. For growth forecasts to 2030, it is estimated that the oil-sands mining industry will require 1.4% of the average annual flow of the Athabasca River. Overall, by 2030, it is projected that the entire oil-sands industry will use less than 0.4% of Alberta's average annual water supply to produce 80% of Canada's total oil production.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.043
Threshold uncertainty score0.309

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0030.009
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0020.001
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.010
GPT teacher head0.184
Teacher spread0.174 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations12
Published2013
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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