Brain Candy
Faculty Enrolment
The Faculty of Engineering currently has approximately 5000 students. Of those students, about 3800 are undergraduate and nearly 1000 are first years! And that doesn't even include students in transfer programs at other institutions!
Blast furnace
Steam is injected into the ground through a series of wells to heat oilsands until bitumen begins to disengage from other sediments and flows into pools that can be collected by other wells.
Sources: Developing Alberta's Oil Sands, by Paul Chastko, and Fort McMurray's Oil Sands Discovery Centre
Leftovers tell a tale
Tailings are leftovers -- water, silt and other particles -- from the bitumen extraction process.
Sources: Developing Alberta's Oil Sands, by Paul Chastko, and Fort McMurray's Oil Sands Discovery Centre
Coming down the pipe...
It takes three days for oil to travel from Fort McMurray to Edmonton via pipeline, at an average pace of five km/h.
Sources: Developing Alberta's Oil Sands, by Paul Chastko, and Fort McMurray's Oil Sands Discovery Centre
Refining bitumen
Did you know that bitumen is refined by adding hydrogen?
Sources: Developing Alberta's Oil Sands, by Paul Chastko, and Fort McMurray's Oil Sands Discovery Centre
The Great Canadian Oilsands project
Suncor (formerly Sun Oil) provided about 99 per cent of the funding necessary to launch the Great Canadian Oil Sands project in the 1960s.
Sources: Developing Alberta's Oil Sands, by Paul Chastko, and Fort McMurray's Oil Sands Discovery Centre
Lots to go around
Alberta's three major oilsands deposits are associated with Fort McMurray, Cold Lake and Peace River.
Sources: Developing Alberta's Oil Sands, by Paul Chastko, and Fort McMurray's Oil Sands Discovery Centre
Bitumen extraction
Bituminous oil is difficult to extract for many reasons, one of which is its high specific gravity. When unrefined oil is poured into a glass of water it sinks.
Sources: Developing Alberta's Oil Sands, by Paul Chastko, and Fort McMurray's Oil Sands Discovery Centre
Bitumen's first advocate
As president of the University of Alberta, Henry Marshall Tory supported research to find a commercial use for bitumen. He hired Karl Clark, a junior scientist languishing in the federal government's Mines Branch, to develop a process for separating oil from the sands, finding laboratory space for the young researcher in the basement of the U of A's power plant.
Sources: Developing Alberta's Oil Sands, by Paul Chastko, and Fort McMurray's Oil Sands Discovery Centre
Early uses of bitumen
In 1789, explorer Alexander Mackenzie noted in his diary that aboriginal people living along the Athabasca River used oilsands mixed with spruce resin to gum canoes.
Sources: Developing Alberta's Oil Sands, by Paul Chastko, and Fort McMurray's Oil Sands Discovery Centre
A bit about bitumen
Did you know that the oil contained in Alberta's bitumen deposits amounts to 1.75-2.5 trillion barrels, at least seven times the reserves of Saudi Arabia?
Sources: Developing Alberta's Oil Sands, by Paul Chastko, and Fort McMurray's Oil Sands Discovery Centre.
Edmonton motorists spend 5K hours at drive-thrus
A new study from the University of Alberta has found that in Edmonton alone, motorists spend 5,000 hours each day idling in fast-food drive-thrus while waiting for their orders -- an action that is having a serious impact on the environment.
The researchers, who are natural resource economists from the U of A, set up a station at a Tim Hortons drive-thru and monitored the type of vehicles, the number of vehicles, and the amount of time each spent idling in the drive-thru from the time it entered the line-up until it drove away from the final pickup window.
Source: CTV.ca
Notable moment in drive-through history
After monitoring the average time cars spend waiting for a double-double at Tim Hortons, U of A students estimate the amount of carbon dioxide produced daily at one Tim Hortons to be 385 kilograms.
They also figure idling done at Edmonton drive-thrus spews 8,600 tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year.
Source: Alberta Venture Magazine, February 2007.
Major areas of research
The Faculty of Engineering’s educational and research activities are predominantly focused in four broad areas: (1) Energy and Natural Resources Engineering, (2) Nanotechnology and Interfacial Engineering, (3) Information and Communications Technology, an (4) Biomedical Engineering.
Major expansion
The Faculty of Engineering at the
One of the biggest and the best
The Faculty of Engineering at the
Did you know that NREF:
• excavated enough dirt to fill 4,000 dump trucks?
• has enough structural steel to manufacture 1,500 cars?
• has enough concrete for over 300 residential basements?
• has enough data cable to stretch from Edmonton to Calgary?
Canada's quietest building
The National Institute for Nanotechnology (NINT) has operated at the Uof A since 1999 and is only one of five facilities of its kind in the world. The $120 million NINT building is specially designed to prevent vibration, temperature and pressures from affecting research. It is Canada's quietest building.
Leading faculty
The Faculty of Engineering is one of North America’s leading engineering research and teaching centres with approximately 5,000 students, 38 research chairs, over $50 million in annual research funding, over 150 professors, and over 1 million square feet of new teaching and research space.
