Oil Sands Mining

The Oil Sands Mining data model set is an integrated set of Enterprise, Business Area, and Data Warehouse data models developed to support the mining and processing operations of companies engaged in recovering oil from bituminous sands.

Oil sands are typically either loose sands or sandstone containing a mixture of sand, clay and water saturated with bitumen. While oil sands mining is most widespread in western Canada, there are also large reserves of oil sands in Kazakhstan, Russia, and Venezuela with total global estimates of several trillion barrels of oil in place. Recent technological advances, especially in Canada, coupled with higher oil prices, have significantly increased economically recoverable oil sands reserves to from 100 billion to several hundred billion barrels, depending on the oil price used.

Mining oil sands is a high volume, relatively low margin business, as the cost to extract, process and transport oil from oil sands is high relative to some other sources of petroleum. Therefore, important determining factors in the economic utilization of oil sands deposits are the proximity of the deposit to the surface, with most mines operating at a depth of 50 meters or less, and the availability of transportation infrastructure to deliver diluent to the mine and then move the dilbit or synbit to an upgrader or refinery. Additionally, oil sands miners usually operate at vast scale and exploit opportunities to highly automate their operations, both to increase volumes and to reduce requirements for human resources who can be expensive in the remote locations where oil sands deposits are often located. This has resulted in some cases in the adoption of technologies such as remotely monitored driverless vehicles.

ADRM's Oil Sands Mining data model set provides a data architecture for the integration of planning and operational data with support for, among other things:

For oil sands mining organizations interested in integrating trading, marketing and hedging data into their overall information infrastructure, ADRM provides a very comprehensive Energy & Commodity Trading Solution Model which integrates with our Oil Sands Mining data model set. Our Oil Sands Mining data models are also compatible with our Oil & Gas Upstream, Oil & Gas Midstream, Petroleum Refining, and Oil & Gas Downstream data model sets.