As global demand for crude oil has increased, exploration scientists have looked to domestic North American sources such as the Alaskan pipeline or to the Canadian oil sands to limit dependence on imported sources of petroleum. Policy makers and scientists continue to debate whether the Athabasca Oil Sands in Northern Alberta, Canada is an effective alternative to imported oil.

The sands are a rough combination of materials including semi-solid crude, silica, clay and water, making it difficult to process the byproduct fully. Unlike light sweet crude oil-based sends can be expensive to process oil from, even though the expansive Canadian Oil Sands have over an estimated 1.5 trillion barrels of bituminous oil. Estimates suggest that nearly 10% of these sands are able to be processed into oil economically using today's technology. Based on these estimates, the Oil Sands in Canada contain the second largest oil reserves in the world behind Saudi Arabias proven oil reserves. While much of Saudi oil is in the form of light sweet crude, which is relatively easy to process and refine, the vast difficulty of processing sand-based crude oil makes the Oil Sands uneconomical for full processing into refined oils.

As technology improves, it becomes more efficient for companies to process less pure sources of crude, such as the reserves in the Canadian Oil Sands. While this refining technology has improved, there are still a wide range of difficulties in efficiently processing some of the reserves in Alberta; as a result, the reserves cannot be relied upon to provide all of the necessary oil reserves for immediate production in North America. Relative to imported light sweet crude oil from the Middle East, processing the vast majority of the crude in the Oil Sands remains pending improvements in refining and extraction technology.