Tar Sands: Blunting Oil’s Peak

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By EV World 2005 ASPO oil conference presentation by Suncor executive vice president Michael Ashar on the potential of Alberta’s ‘oil sands’.
January 03, 2006
It can't be said that the organizers of the November 2005 ASPO USA "peak oil" conference held in Denver weren't willing to consider the role to be played by unconventional hydrocarbon reserves in replacing declining conventional oil production worldwide, including oil shale and tar sands, both of which are in abundant supply in North America. They asked Michael Ashar, an executive vice president with Suncor, one of the early Canadian tar sand pioneers, to talk about these rich, bitumen-laced deposits, which rival, by some estimates, the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia.
I have a very different perspective to share this afternoon," he began. "Think abundance, not depletion when it comes to oil. Think mining, not drilling. And think possibilities as opposed to paucity".
Ashar has 30 years of oil refining experience and from 1996 until 2004 ran Suncor's oil sands operation in Canada, which when it commenced in the early 1960's was, in his words, one of the biggest energy gambles in history.
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