Global News shows that more than 8,000 workers in Alberta's oilsands have now received a first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, as the province tries to contain outbreaks at over a dozen work sites.
Over 3,000 people have been infected in 2 outbreaks alone at Canadian Natural Resource's Horizon mine site and the Mildred Lake Site operated by Syncrude.
As Heather Yourex-West reports, a federal exemption surrounding workers brought in from outside the country is being blamed.
The province of Alberta in Canada has a lot of oil resources. The Athabasca oil sands (also known as the Athabasca tar sands) are large deposits of bitumen or extremely heavy crude oil, located in northeastern Alberta, Canada - roughly centred on the boomtown of Fort McMurray. These oil sands, hosted primarily in the McMurray Formation, consist of a mixture of crude bitumen (a semi-solid rock-like form of crude oil), silica sand, clay minerals, and water. The Athabasca deposit is the largest known reservoir of crude bitumen in the world and the largest of 3 major oil sands deposits in Alberta, along with the nearby Peace River and Cold Lake deposits (the latter stretching into Saskatchewan).
Together, these large oil sand deposits certainly lie under 141,000 square kilometres of boreal forest and muskeg (peat bogs) and contain about 1.7 trillion barrels (270×109 m3) of bitumen in-place, comparable in magnitude to the world's total proven reserves of conventional petroleum. The International Energy Agency (IEA) lists the economically recoverable reserves, at 2007 prices and modern unconventional oil production technology, to be 178 billion barrels (28.3×109 m3), or about 10% of these deposits. These contribute to Canada's total proven reserves being the third largest in the world, after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela's Orinoco Belt.
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