The Athabasca Oil Sands in Alberta, Canada now cover roughly 100 square miles (258 square kilometers). The facility has expanded as its production of oil increased since the 1990s - an average of 3.1 million barrels were extracted each day in 2018, which is four times as much as in 2005. Athabasca contains Earth’s largest known deposit of bitumen, a semi-solid form of crude oil that occurs as a mixture of sand, clay, and water. The additional energy required to mine and then remove the sand from