workers, many of them from Eastern Canada, especially Newfoundland. Fort McMurray ceased to be an incorporated city in 1995 and is now an urban service area within Wood Buffalo.
Estimated oil reserves
The Alberta government’s Energy and Utilities Board (EUB) estimated in 2007 that about 173 billion barrels (27.510^9 m3) of crude bitumen are economically recoverable from the three Alberta oil sands areas based on benchmark WTI market prices of per barrel in 2006, rising to a projected per barrel in 2016 using current technology. This was equivalent to about 10% of the estimated 1,700 billion barrels (27010^9 m3) of bitumen-in-place. In fact WTI prices topped 3 in May 2008. Alberta estimated that the Athabasca deposits alone contain 35 billion barrels (5.610^9 m3) of surface mineable bitumen and 98 billion barrels (15.610^9 m3) of bitumen recoverable by in-situ methods. These estimates of Canada’s reserves were doubted when they were first published but are now largely accepted by the international oil industry. This volume placed Canadian proven reserves second in the world behind those of Saudi Arabia.
Syncrude’s Mildred Lake mine site and plant
The method of calculating economically recoverable reserves that produced these estimates was adopted because conventional methods of accounting for reserves gave increasingly meaningless numbers. They made it appear that Alberta was running out of oil at a time when rapid increases in oil sands production were more than offsetting declines in conventional oil, and in fact most of Alberta’s oil production is now unconventional oil. Conventional estimates of oil reserves are really calculations of the geological risk of drilling for oil, but in the oil sands there
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