Ok... Time for a lesson in the production of oil from sand.

The oilsand is heated and mixed with water to separate the sand out and then mixed with a diluent to make it flow better. It's called bitumen at this point.

Raw bitumen is then fed into huge cokers. The long heavy bitumen molecules are heated and cracked (or broken down) into lighter molecules. The by-product of this cracking process is coke.

Coke is a coal-like substance but has a higher sulphur content. The remaining lighter molecules of kerosene, naphtha, and gas oil are removed from the coker in the form of vapour.

The second step in the upgrading process is fractionation. A fractionator separates the cracked bitumen into various components. This happens at different temperatures and levels of the fractionator: the hottest temperature is at the bottom, while the temperature gets cooler as it nears the top. Bitumen components that boil at the hottest temperature condense first and are removed low in the tower; bitumen components that boil at cooler temperatures rise and are extracted further up the tower. Therefore, the order in which the various components condense from the bottom of the fractionator to the top are: gas-oil, kerosene, naphtha, sour gas. Eventually all the vapours leave the fractionator and are processed in the final stage of upgrading - hydrodesulpurization.

In the final stage of upgrading, hydrogen is added to the vapours and sulphur is removed as a means to purify the petroleum liquids from the fractionator. Some of the sulphur is tracked to sulphur refineries for commercial use, while the remainder is stockpiled on site. The clean liquid products are removed from the hydrodesulphurization unit and stored in tanks until they are recombined for shipment as synthetic crude oil. This product is called synthetic crude oil; synthetic because its original molecular structure was changed in the upgrading process.

Synthetic crude oil is sent to refineries and made into other petroleum products that are sold to consumers around the world.

FYI... I had to dig this up. We just build the big plants...