During fracking, liquid is pumped into the ground at a high pressure to create holes, or fractures, that release oil. The sand helps keep the holes open as water, oil and gas flow through it.

Here Syncrude, Canada's largest oil producer, digs bitumen-laced sand from the ground with electric shovels five stories high, then washes the bitumen off the sand with hot water and sometimes ...

Companies big and small are figuring out how to manage the Permian Basin’s unprecedented volume of produced water.

Oil fields are just as quick to make fortunes as break them. The 1901 Spindletop gusher in Texas jumpstarted the petroleum age, crashing oil prices. A mere two years later, over-extraction drove the ...

Engineers have developed a groundbreaking computational model to study the movement of granular materials such as soils, sands and powders. By integrating the dynamic interactions among particles, air ...