Awkwardly for oil companies, bitumen is not ordinary oil.

They remove bitumen from the dirt in two ways.

Moreover, the newer bitumen technology does without strip mines.

Awkwardly for environmentalists, Nature put corrosive bitumen in the dirt.

Environmentalists make several arguments for leaving the bitumen in the dirt.

Cities have a lot of black asphalt and dark, heat absorbing structures.

The companies want the bitumen that Nature put in the oily dirt.

This heats the bitumen, making it runny enough to be pumped out.

The companies want the bitumen that Nature put in the oily dirt.

Laying kilometer upon kilometer of bitumen is the favored solution for many politicians.

Each morning people are awoken by the sounds of metal against the asphalt sidewalks.

US President Barack Obama has a limited opportunity to preserve the bitumen companies integrity.

In cities, pollen particles fall on concrete and asphalt rather than being absorbed by the soil.

The tar sands are hundreds of square kilometers of bitumen, a viscous and corrosive tarlike deposit.

Many bitumen companies claim that they already abide by such safeguards but environmentalists skepticism is justified.

Bitumen permeates the dirt at the surface or, where thin layers of compost and sediment intervene, somewhat below basement levels.

It has one runway designated 9 27 with an asphalt and concrete surface measuring 7,200 by 150 feet (2,194 x 45 m).

Mandatory sequestration could make net CO2 emissions from bitumen extraction no worse than those from conventional oil wells, and perhaps even better.

An older technology features vast strip mines, huge diggers, and trucks carting oily dirt to industrial scale pressure cookers that drain off the bitumen.

On a hot day in New York, locals sprawl out on the grass fields of Central Park, not on asphalt parking lots or concrete sidewalks.

Bricks, concrete, and asphalt the building blocks from which cities are made absorb much more heat from the sun than vegetation does in the countryside.

The second was when Mouzarzra residents embarked on a 50km march demanding to put asphalt on the road between their town and the city of Tikend.

These conditions do occur with strong heating at ground level, for example when the sun has been shining on sand or asphalt, commonly generating an inferior image.

Standardized earthen plumbing pipes with broad flanges making use of asphalt for preventing leakages appeared in the urban settlements of the Indus Valley Civilization by 2700 B.C.

Two friends on a motorbike would make a usual summer photo with hot asphalt. However, when one considers who these two friends are, the photo becomes very unusual.

After about one year it was determined that asphalt rubber overlays resulted in up to 12 decibels of in road noise reduction, with a typical reduction of 7 to 9 decibels.

Had BP spilled hundreds of billions of barrels of bitumen across hundreds of square kilometers, environmentalists would rightly demand that no expense be spared to rid the dirt of every trace of oil.

These measures counter the heat island effect caused by an abundance of tarmac and asphalt, which can make urban areas several degrees warmer than surrounding rural areas as much as six degrees Celsius during the evening.

What we do is we take a fire hydrant, a no parking space associated with a fire hydrant, and we prescribe the removal of the asphalt to create an engineered micro landscape, to create an infiltration opportunity.

And by presenting a really strong economic case, they convinced the L.A. government that replacing that asphalt with trees and other greenery, that the schools themselves would save the system more on energy than they spend on horticultural infrastructure.

Besides the largest conventional oil reserves and the second largest natural gas reserves in the Western Hemisphere, Venezuela has non conventional oil deposits (extra heavy crude oil, bitumen and tar sands) approximately equal to the world's reserves of conventional oil.

So ultimately, 20 million square feet of asphalt was replaced or avoided, and electrical consumption for air conditioning went down, while employment for people to maintain those grounds went up, resulting in a net savings to the system, but also healthier students and schools system employees as well.