The Western Canada Sedimentary Basin (WCSB) underlies of

Western Canada Western Canada, also referred to as the Western provinces, Canadian West, or Western provinces of Canada, and commonly known within Canada as the West, is a list of regions of Canada, Canadian region that includes the four western provinces and t ...

including southwestern

Manitoba Manitoba is a Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Canada at the Centre of Canada, longitudinal centre of the country. It is Canada's Population of Canada by province and territory, fifth-most populous province, with a population ...

, southern

Saskatchewan Saskatchewan is a Provinces and territories of Canada, province in Western Canada. It is bordered on the west by Alberta, on the north by the Northwest Territories, on the east by Manitoba, to the northeast by Nunavut, and to the south by the ...

Alberta Alberta is a Provinces and territories of Canada, province in Canada. It is a part of Western Canada and is one of the three Canadian Prairies, prairie provinces. Alberta is bordered by British Columbia to its west, Saskatchewan to its east, t ...

, northeastern

British Columbia British Columbia is the westernmost Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Canada. Situated in the Pacific Northwest between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains, the province has a diverse geography, with rugged landscapes that ...

and the southwest corner of the

Northwest Territories The Northwest Territories is a federal Provinces and territories of Canada, territory of Canada. At a land area of approximately and a 2021 census population of 41,070, it is the second-largest and the most populous of Provinces and territorie ...

. This vast sedimentary basin consists of a massive wedge of

sedimentary rock Sedimentary rocks are types of rock (geology), rock formed by the cementation (geology), cementation of sediments—i.e. particles made of minerals (geological detritus) or organic matter (biological detritus)—that have been accumulated or de ...

extending from the Rocky Mountains in the west to the Canadian Shield in the east. This wedge is about thick under the Rocky Mountains, but thins to zero at its eastern margins. The WCSB contains one of the world's largest reserves of

petroleum Petroleum, also known as crude oil or simply oil, is a naturally occurring, yellowish-black liquid chemical mixture found in geological formations, consisting mainly of hydrocarbons. The term ''petroleum'' refers both to naturally occurring un ...

and natural gas and supplies much of the

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere, Northern and Western Hemisphere, Western hemispheres. North America is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South Ameri ...

n market, producing more than per day of gas in 2000. It also has huge reserves of

coal Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock, formed as rock strata called coal seams. Coal is mostly carbon with variable amounts of other Chemical element, elements, chiefly hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen. Coal i ...

. Of the provinces and territories within the WCSB, Alberta has most of the oil and gas reserves and almost all of the oil sands.

Conventional oil

The WCSB is considered a mature area for exploration of

and recent development has tended toward natural gas and oil sands rather than conventional oil. In the WCSB, conventional oil is of two different types: light crude oil and heavy crude oil, each with different costs, prices, and development strategies. Conventional light oil is a mature industry with most of the recoverable

oil reserves An oil is any chemical polarity, nonpolar chemical substance that is composed primarily of hydrocarbons and is hydrophobe, hydrophobic (does not mix with water) and lipophilicity, lipophilic (mixes with other oils). Oils are usually flammable ...

already produced and production declining by three to four percent per year. Conventional heavy oil is also past its production peak with a future of long-term decline. Alberta, which contains most of the reserves, expects its light-medium crude oil production to decline by 42% from 2006 to 2016, while it expects heavy crude production to decrease by 35% over the same period. However, it also expects bitumen and synthetic crude oil from oil sands will considerably more than offset the decline in conventional crude oil and account for 87% of Alberta oil production by 2016. For light oil, the

petroleum industry The petroleum industry, also known as the oil industry, includes the global processes of hydrocarbon exploration, exploration, extraction of petroleum, extraction, oil refinery, refining, Petroleum transport, transportation (often by oil tankers ...

is searching for the remaining undiscovered pools, drilling infill oil wells, or redeveloping existing pools using enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques such as waterfloods, miscible floods, and

carbon dioxide Carbon dioxide is a chemical compound with the chemical formula . It is made up of molecules that each have one carbon atom covalent bond, covalently double bonded to two oxygen atoms. It is found in a gas state at room temperature and at norma ...

injection. Currently, only about 27 percent of light oil is recovered, leaving large opportunities for improvement. For conventional heavy oil, the industry is exploring new zones in undrilled portions of the basin to find remaining undiscovered pools, or to apply EOR schemes such as water floods, thermal projects, and miscible floods such as the Vapour Extraction Process (VAPEX) technology. Only 15 percent of heavy oil is currently being recovered, leaving a large volume for future recovery. Improved seismic and drilling technology, higher recoveries from existing pools through infill drilling, and efficient, cost-effective exploration and development of smaller pools are maintaining levels of conventional oil production in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin. As the basin matures, the resource triangle with few large pools at the top, and many small pools at the base is being economically pursued deeper into the smaller pool segment as a result of these efficiencies.

Oil sands

According to the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board (EUB, now known as the Alberta Energy Regulator, the AER), Alberta's oil sands areas contain an ultimately recoverable crude

bitumen Bitumen ( , ) is an immensely viscosity, viscous constituent of petroleum. Depending on its exact composition, it can be a sticky, black liquid or an apparently solid mass that behaves as a liquid over very large time scales. In American Engl ...

resource of 50 billion cubic metres (315 billion barrels), with remaining established reserves of almost 28 billion cubic metres (174 billion barrels) at year-end 2004. The Athabasca Oil Sands, the Cold Lake Oil Sands and the Peace River Oil Sands, which contain initial oil-in-place reserves of 260 billion cubic metres (1.6 trillion barrels), an amount comparable to the total world reserves of conventional oil. The World Energy Council reported (2007) that the three Alberta oil sands areas contain at least two-thirds of the world's discovered

in place. These three major oil sands areas, all in Alberta, have reserves that dwarf those of the conventional oil fields. By 2007 the Alberta natural bitumen deposits were the source of over one third of the crude oil produced in Canada. As a result of the oil price increases since 2003, the number of major

mining Mining is the Resource extraction, extraction of valuable geological materials and minerals from the surface of the Earth. Mining is required to obtain most materials that cannot be grown through agriculture, agricultural processes, or feasib ...

, upgrading and thermal

in-situ is a Latin phrase meaning 'in place' or 'on site', derived from ' ('in') and ' ( ablative of ''situs'', ). The term typically refers to the examination or occurrence of a process within its original context, without relocation. The term is use ...

projects has grown to some 46 existing and proposed projects, encompassing 135 project expansion phases in various stages of execution. Estimates of capital expenditures to construct all announced projects over the period 2006 to 2015 total $125 billion. According to a Statistics Canada 2006 report, this extremely high level of activity has caused a severe labor shortage in Alberta and driven unemployment rates to their lowest level in history – the lowest of all 10 Canadian provinces and 50 U.S. states. This is the main factor limiting growth of oil sands production in the WCSB.

Natural gas

Canada is the third largest producer and second largest exporter of gas in the world, with the vast majority of it coming from the WCSB. The WCSB is estimated to have of marketable gas remaining (discovered and undiscovered), which represents about two thirds of Canadian gas reserves. Over half of the gas produced is exported to the United States. However, Canadian gas reserves represent less than one percent of world reserves and are rapidly becoming exhausted according to a 2010 paper. The majority of the large gas pools have been discovered and a significant portion of the discovered reserves has been produced. Production from the basin peaked in 2001 at around per day and was predicted in 2003, by the National Energy Board to be likely to decline from that level. The overall decline rate increased from 13 percent per year in 1992 to 23 percent in 2002, which means of production must be replaced each year just to keep production constant. With the basin being largely explored and operators finding less gas with each new well, this seems improbable. New gas reserves in the WCSB will likely come from unconventional sources such as coalbed methane (CBM). The number of coalbed methane wells in Alberta more than doubled in 2005, to 7764 by the end of that year, producing nearly of gas per day. More than 95 percent of the CBM wells were completed in the Upper Cretaceous Horseshoe Canyon and Belly River formations, at typical depths of . About 4 percent of the CBM wells are completed in the Lower Cretaceous Mannville Formation, at depths of . Author David J. Hughes in his 2004 book entitled ''North America's Natural Gas Crisis'', predicted that the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin would likely continue to be the main gas supply area in Canada for many years; however, declining production and the likelihood that much of the gas will be diverted to fuel new oil sands plants mean that the probability of there being sufficient surplus gas to meet projected U.S. demand is low, and the US will have to look elsewhere for future gas supplies.

Coal

The WCSB contains about 90 percent of Canada's usable coal resources. Their rank ranges from lignite to semianthracite. About 36 percent of the total estimated 71,000 megatonnes of usable coal is bituminous, including a high proportion of medium to low volatile coals. The low

sulfur Sulfur ( American spelling and the preferred IUPAC name) or sulphur ( Commonwealth spelling) is a chemical element; it has symbol S and atomic number 16. It is abundant, multivalent and nonmetallic. Under normal conditions, sulfur atoms ...

content and acceptable ash levels of these bituminous coals make them attractive as coking feedstocks, and large quantities are mined for that purpose. However, the lack of heavy industry in Western Canada means that only a limited amount of this coal is consumed in Canada, and most is exported to Japan, Korea and other countries. The lower rank coals are used mainly for electricity generation, where the existence of shallow coal seams with little overburden make strip-mining and reclamation easy, and low sulfur levels reduce the environmental impact of their use.

References

External links

Alberta Department of Energy (ADOE)

Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB)

Alberta Geological Survey (AGS)

Alberta Research Council (ARC)

Canadian Gas Potential Committee (CGPC)

Canadian Society of Petroleum Geologists (CSPG)

Geological Survey of Canada (GSC)

National Energy Board of Canada (NEB)

Saskatchewan Industry and Resources (SIR)
{{Coord, 55, N, 112, W, region:CA, display=title Foreland basins Structural basins of Canada Sedimentary basins of North America Fossil fuels in Canada Petroleum industry in Alberta Coal mining regions in Canada Oil fields of Canada Oil fields of Alberta Oil-bearing shales in Canada Geology of Canada Stratigraphy of Canada Geology of Western Canada Geology of Manitoba Geology of Saskatchewan Geology of Alberta Geology of British Columbia Geology of the Northwest Territories