Geophysics Comes of Age in Oil Sands Development

Abstract

Most energy forecasters predict that the development of shallow heavy oil reserves in Canada’s enormous oil sand deposits will play a vital role in bridging the gap between North America’s reliance on conventional oil in this century, and the full integration of alternative energy supplies in the next century. Over the last year, a number of surface geophysical techniques have been successfully applied to oil sands exploration and development. These innovations have come after over fifteen years of near stagnation in the area of innovative applications of geophysics to the oil sands. These applications include the direct exploration and detection of oil sands, the calculation of bitumen saturation from surface, the exploration for water supplies beneath the oil sands, geological mapping, mapping and imaging of thick clays and shales for geotechnical purposes, and non-intrusive monitoring of leachate plumes. Geophysical techniques successfully applied to these problems include 2-D electrical resistivity imaging, transient EM, ground penetrating radar, and high resolution seismic reflection. Other techniques which will probably be used in the very near future include induced polarization, surface nuclear magnetic resonance, and various push-probe sensing techniques. This paper will review present applications of the above techniques in the surface mineable ore reserves of the Athabasca deposit.