Conventional oil is liquid petroleum in underground deposits produced by digging oil wells and extracting it with pumpjacks.
Alberta's first successful oil well was drilled in Leduc in 1947. In 2007, according to the government of Alberta, conventional crude oil amounted to 21 percent of Canada's total crude oil production.
Conventional crude earned the province $4.4 billion in royalties from 2005 to 2008, the third-largest source of nonrenewable resource revenue for Albertans during the 2007-2008 fiscal year.
The oil-rich Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin, primarily in northern Alberta, contains both conventional and unconventional oil. The crude oil in the "sands" is a tarry semi-solid called bitumen that must be heated or diluted to flow.
Strip mining bitumen began in 1967. Hot water separates the oil from the sand in an extraction plant with the waste water--called tailings--funneled to ponds.
Bitumen is mined in underground reservoirs by injecting steam into wells to liquefy it so it can be extracted.
Commercial production began in the 1960s in the Athabasca oil sand field, which is larger than Florida.
Bitumen needs upgrading to be refined. As of 2009, there were three upgraders in Alberta with three under construction and 10 more planned.
Alberta's oil sands cover 140,200 square km (54,132 square miles). It takes about two metric tons of oil sand to produce a barrel of oil. According to the government of Alberta, producers moved enough overburden to fill New York's Yankee Stadium every two days in 2007.
Alberta's unconventional Athabasca deposit is the biggest reservoir of crude bitumen in the world. The province also has two other fields in the oil sands and heavy crude oil fields on its eastern border with Saskatchewan.
Alberta's conventional oil reserves were about 1.6 billion barrels in 2003 and new discoveries are down. Since technologies in 2000 allowed only 26 percent of light crude deposits and 15 percent of heavy crude to be recovered, enhanced oil recovery techniques could increase Alberta's conventional reserve supply, according to Oilsands Quest.
The tailing ponds from Alberta's surface mines cover more than 5,000 hectares (50 square km) and can be seen with the naked eye from space.
Alberta is home to one of the world's largest dams. It was built to hold toxic waste from just one surface mining operation in the oil sands. The ponds are so toxic, hundreds of migrating ducks died in one in 2008, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported.