Oil sands: Reservoir or orebody?

With the advent of large-scale mining projects in the Athabasca area of Alberta, the oil industry and the mining industry have been brought together in a common cause. Each industry is contributing towards the successful exploitation of the resource but there have been differences of approach between the technical personnel with mining and petroleum backgrounds. This paper discusses the differences between a mining and petroleum approach to the evaluation of the resource potential in the area and describes Petro-Canada's method of evaluating surface mining areas.