There's a major oil boom going on in Alberta,Canada. At first sight it doesn't resemble a traditional oil field that one sees in the Middle East or even closer home in Texas. The difference is that here you don't have to drill for oil, you have to 'mine' it. Here the oil is found mixed in tar like sand just below the earth's surface. You just have to remove the topsoil and scoop out the oil rich sands using large mechanical shovels. These sands are estimated to contain 1.6 trillion barrels of oil, larger than the reserves of Saudi Arabia. The recoverable oil, using current technology, is about 174 billion barrels.
Oil has not been found overnight in the region. Its existence has been known and documented for a very long time. It is only because the process of mining the sand and turning it into oil is complicated and expensive that few companies paid any attention to it in the past. Those that did have made a fortune, with oil prices climbing to $110 a barrel, and likely to remain high in the near future. Given the size of the reserves, coupled with the political and business environment in Canada, getting companies to invest in the development of this industry is not a problem, in spite of the expense and the technical complications involved.
But mining for oil comes at a high environmental cost. Large tracts of forest have been cleared for strip mining of the oil rich sand. This type of mining also causes scarring of the earth's surface. Extracting oil from the oil sands releases three times as much carbon di-oxide than traditional oil drilling.
Canada is a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol, which requires it to cut greenhouse gases by 2012. It might not be able to meet the targets because of its oil industry. Canada has announced strict rules for the oil industry to capture its carbon emissions. The companies are also constantly working on new technologies to make this possible.