Quotes About Bitumen

By the 1850s, turpentine production was declining in America. A new competitor surged into the lamp oil market: coal oil, distilled from cannel coal (oil shale) or asphalt/bitumen, a heavy hydrocarbon found naturally in semisolid pools such as Pitch Lake on the Caribbean island of Trinidad and the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.

Gesner concentrated on developing a fuel for lighting. He used the pitch he had collected in Trinidad as feedstock, conducting some two thousand separate experiments. By 1846, he had successfully distilled coal oil, as it was commonly called, from this bitumen.

One of the expert witnesses against Abraham Gesner in the trial challenging his Canadian bitumen mining claims had been Benjamin Silliman Jr., an 1837 Yale College graduate and subsequently a professor of chemistry there.

The safest way to ship bitumen is by rail. Now, there are other things that you get doing it that way. There's probably more greenhouse gases in shipping it by rail. I think certainly there are.

There's a lot of propaganda that contaminates a discussion around what we should do about pipelines, how our economy may or may not be dependent on exports of raw bitumen.

The reality is that Rachel Notley's adherence to pipelines and exporting raw bitumen doesn't make sense for Alberta's economy and it doesn't make sense for Canada.

Twelve barrels of water are required to make one barrel of bitumen. This produces 400 million gallons a day of toxic wastewater at the tar sand mines.

Bitumen, the new national staple, is redefining the character and destiny of Canada. Rapid development of the tar sands has created a foreign policy that favours the export of bitumen to the United States and lax immigration standards that champion the import of global bitumen workers.

Much of the U.S. Midwest is already running on bitumen. Do we want to extend this addiction? And at what cost? Or should we set other goals and say one to two million barrels of oil a day from the tar sands is all we really need to make the transition?

We oppose any pipeline whose sole purpose is to export bitumen from Canada to make profits in other countries.

When we talk about product by pipeline or product by rail we need to be highly specific about what product we are shipping and under what terms and for what purpose. Solid bitumen by rail is safe as houses, but as again crude by rail poses different risk.

From a Canadian partisan perspective, the more we can upgrade bitumen in Canada, the more we can create jobs in value added, in tax revenues for all Canadians.