Canada’s Energy Consumption by Product (Exajoules)
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Oil Sands
About 58% of Canada’s total oil production is from oil sands. The extra heavy crude produced from the oil sands formation is called bitumen.
Oil sands can be produced by mining or in-situ:
Mining: The bitumen is extracted from the surface using traditional mining techniques and then physically separated from the sand in a processing plant. Mined bitumen is either upgraded into a lighter crude oil, called Synthetic Crude Oil (SCO), or diluted with light liquids (often condensates) so that it can be thinned and transported by pipeline.
In-situ: Relies on high-pressure steam to recover bitumen from underground reservoirs. The most common method is steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD); the other is cyclic steam stimulation (CSS). -
Conventional Oil and Gas
Roughly 40% of Canada’s oil and almost all of Canada’s natural gas is called conventional production. Traditionally, oil and gas were produced from vertical wells, but today, horizontal wells and hydraulic fracturing are the dominant methods.
While it is not always in shale formations, this new production technique is often called shale gas or shale oil. The Montney and the Duvernay are two dominant Canadian shale plays.
Other components:
NGLs: Light liquids often byproducts of natural gas, including ethane, propane, and butane.
Condensate and Pentanes Plus: Heavier than NGLs, similar to naphtha, used to dilute bitumen for pipeline transport. -
East Coast Production
About 4% of Canada’s oil production comes from four offshore developments in Newfoundland and Labrador: Hibernia, Terra Nova, White Rose, and Hebron.
Canada’s total liquids including NGLs
- Canadian oil production includes oil sands at 3.4 MMB/d (58%), conventional at 1.5 MMB/d (26%), east coast offshore at 0.2 MMB/d (4%) and NGLs at 0.7 MMB/d (12%).
- Since 2005, oil sands production has tripled, but after 2018, production growth has moderated. Production has ranged between 3.1 and 3.2 MMB/d in the last few years (2021, 2022, and 2023).
- Condensate and pentanes plus production has doubled since 2014 and averaged just over 500,000 B/d in 2024. The growth of light liquids is a byproduct of the prolific shale gas and oil wells.