Canada sits on the third-largest oil reserve in the world. Most of it is in the Alberta oilsands, where companies extract bitumen, a crude oil with the consistency of peanut butter. To get the oil to pass through pipelines, petroleum engineers mix the oil with lighter components — usually byproducts of natural gas production — to dilute and liquefy the bitumen. This mixture is called “diluted bitumen†or dilbit for short.
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