RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:Will we get back to $50.37 - Year High?The Oil that is produced is certainly not from quartz and no we are not talking about gold.
The oil is produced from pore spaces in the shale and siltstones and in a few cases some very fine grained sands. The reference to quartz is how much of the mineralogy of these 3 mentioned clastics is actually quartz and not clay minerals but they are certainly not pure quartz.
The clay minerals block the pore throats which in many cases can reduce the permeability to almost zero. Hence to get any oil to flow from the pore space you have to frack the shales/siltstones to reestablish connectivity.
In contrast, the oil sands that Suncor produces from are almost entirely sandstone and relatively coarse sandstone. It is an entirely different production mechanism.