Cracking an oil supply

Useful oil is becoming increasingly hard to find. As global reserves deplete, producers are looking to other, previously untouchable sources, such as tar sands, to refine into petroleum products.

In the tar sands of Alberta, Canada alone, there is an estimated 2.5 trillion barrels of ultra-thick oil. The bitumen in these sands is neither oil nor tar but a semi-solid, degraded form of oil that does not flow at normal temperatures and pressures, making it difficult to extract.

An American technology company, however, has developed a way to transform these ultra-thick oils into oils, gasoline and other petroleum products thin enough to pump through a pipeline.

The technology developed by

is called cold cracking, which uses beams of high-energy electrons to transform the molecular structure of ultra-thick oil. This promises to be less expensive and more energy-efficient than traditional refining methods that involve intense heat and pressure, which breaks some chemical bonds, making the oil less viscous. The cold cracking approach cracks the heavy oil with standard industrial irradiation equipment at room temperature and atmospheric pressure.