Here's some interesting stuff

I have worked in the oil industry cracking tar sands. Here is the skinny.

There is a lot of this tar. Not crude. Tar. It's very sour (high sulfur) and has shorter hydrocarbon chains so you have to hydrogen crack it at several hundred degrees centigrade. A lot of what they have on paper as "unconventional reserves" would be impossible to mine. It may be there, but if you have a 4" thick strip of tarsand under 200' of soil, you are not going to move the soil to get to it. There is a lot more sand that is stuck to the tar than there is tar. It takes one ton of sand and tar to make one barrel of oil. All of this sand is in your processing equipment. This means the equipment is either four times as expensive and extremely wear-resistant and still wears out before it is supposed to, has erodible rubber linings that can be replaced and costs only triple what regular equipment does, or you get a regular piece of equipment and get 1/20th of the life before it's shot. It also takes lots (hundreds of gallons) of steaming hot water to separate the two. All of the water is contaminated. At the end the energy you put into finding, exposing, transporting, washing, separating, and cracking you have used up the barrel you just made. Basically going after tar-sand is a good way to turn Canada into the Gulf of Mexico for zero gain by anyone.

Oil shale is very similar, except now instead of being locked in loose sand the deposits are locked in rock. Multiply all the difficulty from above X2. They've found a way to crack in-situ though and it is a very promising way to extract natural gas if you like drinking more hexane than you already are.

P.S. Artificial food coloring is made from hexane.

[edit on 27-5-2010 by wanderingwaldo]