Equipment must be able to sustain brutally cold winters, abraisive silica sand, sticky bitumen and unstable ground conditions. Although the very first ... Learn more about mining equipment used in the oil sands. ... The norm in oil sands is 4 passes - i.e., 4 shovel loads are required to fill a dump truck. read more
The equipment itself is less important to questions about use of bitumen (which is the gooey oil that comes from melting tar sands) than the energy inputs needed. Tar sands need to be cooked (usually using natural gas) in order to be usable and liquid enough to transition into oil. read more
Given all the time, effort, and equipment needed to recover usable oil from oil sands, the cost of production is quite high—about three times that of drilling for oil. However, this is a tremendous improvement over the situation a few decades ago, when production costs far outweighed the value of the oil recovered. read more