Wishful thinking and rather weak opinion. Tar sludge is a dead horse, at best a bone to be thrown to China. It doesn't begin to fill even a TINY percent of our oil consumption and has tremendous hazardous waste drawbacks. It was a literal pipe dream of Big Oil before fracking brought a boom to the oil and gas industry in the lower 48.
IF that TAR was worth half a bucket of warm spit Canada would be building refineries in the prairie and shipping far more valuable refined products to the USofA rather than TAR in a toxic sludge- the LEAST valuable form... has Capitalism lost it's pea pickin' mind????
Oil Shale MAY be productive, if so the USofA will have even LESS interest in sludge for energy production as we have tremendous reserves of the shale and Canada barely edges out Italy in reserves.
Anyway you slice this, TAR is out.