Forecast For the Future

As you can see in the graph above, you can see the large amounts of money that was invested in tar sands productions. The amount invested in tar sands have increased tremendously over the past few years, at the same time money spent on conventional oil and gas projects have been decreasing. This shows us that Canada has shifted their focus from the conventional oil sources to the tar sands oil. Even though in 2008 economists stated that Canada will be in one of its worst recessions, the government still invested so much money into the tar sands projects even though it provides less oil that the conventional oil (if you were to mine oil from both sources with the same amount of funding) This is showing us that the government of Canada really values the tar sands oil and that it is becoming our main source of oil. However, there are cons to this new shift of interest, as mentioned earlier the cost of processing the tar sands to produce oil is much more costly and it does not produce as much oil as other conventional sources.




As you can see in the graph above, the amount of bitumen in each barrel of crude oil has become almost half of the entire barrel. From the amount of money spent on the tar sand operations shown in the previous graph, only half of the money spent gets usable synthetic crude. The one thing both of these graphs show would be the increase in tar sands activity. Compared to the earlier years, the activity of tar sands projects have increased by almost 700% since 1985 and the amount of oil barrels we get have increased as well. The amounts of money spent on the tar sands operations have also increased by about 8 times the amount spent in 1999. The tar sand deposits in Alberta have become of utter importance to Canada’s economy.

Based on this info, I predict that the activity of tar sands projects will continue to increase for the next few decades, until the oil is irretrievable or until there is a new form of oil that can be used or taken. With the increase in activity, this form of oil will become major components of our economy which could be a good or bad thing, depending on how successful these projects are. If the prices of oil continue to rise, our economy will have great benefits but if the prices of oil were to drop, our economy would also plummet with it. I feel like we will become dependent on the tar sands for our oil consumption needs, which obviously isn’t good because once we’re dependent on this, we won’t try to find other sources of energy that are actually good for the environment. Also, many economists have been saying that tar sands productions are waste of money because of the bitumen content in the oil. Nowadays, the bitumen is being refined and upgraded even further into synthetic crude oil, proving that tar sands won't be as much of a waste of money as the economists thought.