Unconventional Oil Ores around the World: A Review

Abstract With the increasing demand of the conventional oil and gas, unconventional oils are playing an increasingly important role in global energy supplying. Unconventional oil ore (such as oil sands, asphalt rocks) has been widely used in the industry. The bitumen recovered from the unconventional oil ore can be used for the production of synthetic crude oil. Canada has the world’s largest oil sands deposits in Alberta. Since the discovery of the Athabasca oil sands, many technologies have been applied to recovery the bitumen in industry, and the daily production of unconventional oil has reached 10.9 × 106barrels in 2018. However, the Chinese oil sands has not been applied to the industry due to the complex characteristics. Much more attention will be paid to the fundamental research and process development of the unconventional oil ores.