Big money to be found in Canadian oil sands: massive fuel resource just starting to be unearthed.

• Author: Orr, Vanessa

Very few subjects have gotten more press lately than America's dependence on foreign oil and the need to develop new sources of this fossil fuel. But even as the country looks overseas to find new suppliers, some companies are looking to invest their money closer to home-in the rich oil sands of Canada.

"The bottom line is that we have the largest hydrocarbon resource on earth-larger than that of Venezuela and Saudi Arabia," said Pius Rolheiser, spokesman for Imperial Oil Ltd., a publicly traded company in which ExxonMobil is the majority shareholder. "The resource that we have in place is massive. The challenge to us now is to control the costs associated with its recovery."

According to Rolheiser, the size of the resource is estimated to be up to 2.3 trillion barrels of oil, an amount that could be mined from the oil sands outside of Alberta, Canada, for the next 100 to 1,50 years. Of that 2.3 trillion barrels, however, the recovery of 300 billion barrels is currently considered economically feasible using today's technology. Other estimates, including one by Alberta Energy and Utilities Board, estimates the resource at 1.7 trillion barrels of bitumen, with 175 billion barrels recoverable at the present time, and 315 billion barrels ultimately recoverable.

While the concept of recovering oil out of deposits of petroleum buried in sand and clay was once considered a risky investment by most oil company standards, the rising price of fossil fuel, coupled with advancements in technology, has made mining the oil sands a more lucrative proposition. Considering that the oil sands in northern Alberta are buried in an area roughly the size of Florida, there is much to be gained by developing this underground resource.

Though interest in the area is growing, some companies, such as Suncor Energy Inc. and Imperial Oil Ltd., have been investing in the area since the 1950s and '60s. "There have been attempts at commercial production in this area for 50 years or more," said Brad Bellows, spokesman for Suncor Energy Inc. "We started here in 1967 as Great Canadian Oil Sands Limited, a subsidiary of Sun Oil Company, which was led by J. Howard Pew. His goal was to secure a source of energy to reduce North America's dependence on foreign oil sources, and he was right on the money-just off on the timing by about 40 years."

Though Suncor started in the oil sands in 1967, they didn't turn a profit until 1974. "For a long time, there were a lot of problems with reliability...