Foreword — Oil-sands and heavy-oil deposits: Local to global multidisciplinary collaboration

This Special Issue of the Bulletin of Canadian Petroleum Geology grew out of a 3-day symposium on oil sands and heavy-oil co-sponsored by the Canadian Society of Petroleum Geologists (CSPG), the Energy Minerals Division (EMD) of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG), and the AAPG. This symposium, entitled “Oil Sands and Heavy-Oil Symposium: Local to Global Multidisciplinary Collaboration,” was held October, 2014, in Calgary, AB, Canada. The main goals of the symposium were three-fold: 1. to highlight the global nature of the oil sands and heavy-oil resources; 2. to present and review the contributions resource geoscientists are making to the understanding of hydrocarbon emplacement and evolution; reservoir geology and characterization; along with the subsurface challenges of environmental protection, social license, and sustainable energy-development; and, 3. to discuss advances and challenges in recovery and remediation technologies. The originality, complexity, and breadth of ideas and results presented at the symposium warranted further documentation, discussion, and dissemination in the public domain. For this reason, the organizers of this symposium approached the CSPG Editorial Board to publish a special issue on many of the papers presented at the symposium, among others. Now, nearly 2 years later, the result is this volume, which has a wide-range of interests and issues, and keeps with the original multidisciplinary scope of the symposium. The present special volume is arranged according to the main goals and solicited submissions that came out of the symposium. The themes fall under three main categories: 1. basic reservoir characterization and understanding of bitumen-and heavy-oil resources; 2. advances in reservoir-characterization and recovery technologies; 3. geoscience contributions and issues regarding sustainable development. As a preface to the volume, it is requisite to discuss the magnitude and global nature of oil sands and heavy-oil resources. This topic was covered as a session in the original symposium, but no papers were submitted. …