Working in the oil industry in Alberta, I very seldom hear anyone use the term tar sands. Only people outside the industry, in my experience, seem to do so.
Do a search on oil sands in Google and you come up with articles related to the industry and a few against. Do a search on tar sands and you come up with quite a few more links from the enviro-whacko crowd. Again, in my experience, most people in the industry don’t want to be associated with that crowd, and oil sands is the more accurate term. Just doing a preliminary search on a site like Suncor’s and I can’t even find any reference to tar sands, but oil sands, no problem.
The inventor of the aqualung was an inventor named Rene Gagnon-during the WWII occupation of France, gasoline was very scarce. As an alternative, people ran cars on coking gas (the gas driven off when coal is converted to carbon (coke).
Gagnon’s invention was a regulator that fed high pressure coking gas into the carburator of a car. From what I read, this worked reasonably well.
Given our vast stocks of coal, could we do this toady?
Those technical paper links I posted upstream were not from enviro-whacko people. I could ask my librarian to send up a few hundred papers over the last few decades referencing “tar sands;” since I don’t want to pay him to do that then search elsewhere. Google is not the world; each week I run into scads of reputable published papers and books which do not appear on Google. Google is not the arbiter of consensus.
I refuse to argue this any more. Call it whatever you want; both names, and others, are used. I’m not saying you’re wrong about the use of “oil sands”, far from it, you’re quite correct - I merely state that there are other accepted uses which people in the industry use and that it’s not “wrong.” I strongly suspect, but have no citations to back me up, that “oil sands” is pushed as a term to some extent because it has less of a negative connotation to the average person.
FWIW I’ve worked in laboratories on tar sands products, and am currently a “consultant on call” to a Canadian company which is developing these resources.
Uzi without fail will resort to pedantry about minor side (non)issues to avoid serious discussion of the real topic. That’s his debating so-called style.
Yeah, I agree that this is probably the main reason for companies like Suncor to not use terms like ‘tar’ sands. I’m quite sure that I’ve read an article from the Alberta government regarding the usage issue, but can’t find the cite for it. I wasn’t trying to be pedantic about it, btw. Sorry if it came across that way.
Taking a chance on seeming to be even more pedantic, I haven’t responded to adhay here at all, so there isn’t any vice versa to worry over unless he says something worth responding to.
I don’t make a practice of following people around from thread to thread to find things to disagree with them over. If someone says something I disagree with in one thread and something to agree with them in another, then I’ll do so based upon what they say, not who they are.