Canada’s oil industry has bloomed
Canada has seven distinct regions of sedimentary rocks, with every province and territory containing at least a portion of a sedimentary basin. Canada’s seven basins are the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin (WCSB), Atlantic Margin, Arctic Cratonic, Arctic Margin, Eastern Cratonic, Intermontane and Pacific Margin.
Canada’s oil production comes primarily from three sources:
The oil sands which are concentrated in three deposits – the Athabasca, Peace River and Cold Lake areas in Alberta and western Saskatchewan,
The WCSB, which includes southwestern Manitoba, southern Saskatchewan, Alberta, northeastern British Columbia and the southwest corner of the Northwest Territories, and
Canada’s offshore oil fields in the Atlantic.
Alberta is the main hub of Canadian oil, accounting for 78% of Canadian oil production in 2013.
The first oil discovery made in Canada was in 1850 in Lambton County, Ontario. A year after the discovery was made, the International Mining and Manufacturing Company started to exploit the oil springs. Since then, Canada’s oil industry has bloomed. The Energy Information Administration reported that Canada is the world’s fifth-largest oil producer with 173 billion barrels of proved oil reserves, the third largest proved amount in the world, after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.
In 2013, Canada produced more than 4 million barrels per day (BOPD) of petroleum and other liquid fuels, an increase of more than 930,000 BOPD, or 23%, from the decade before. Major oil plays in Canada include the Cardium shale formation, which runs from Eastern British Columbia through Alberta and down into Montana; the Duvernay, which is located in Alberta along the foothills of the Canadian Rockies; and the Mannville Group, which extends east-west from Edmonton to Lloydminster and north-south from the Deep Basin in central west Alberta to the United States border.