I did not mention butane so I don't know why u mention it. Your comments refer only to the subsurface and demonstrate my point: many engineers neglect important problems that fall outside their realm of knowledge and, sad to say, many chemical engineers don't know much about chemistry (that is far from being universally true which is why I used 'many').
The steam doesn't appear magically in the reservoir and when it is reproduced it is far from being pure H2O. It isn't even pure H2O when it goes into the reservoir. There are consequences to both that go far beyond killing the occasional duck (although, that has also had significant repercussions). And even if we ignore what happens with the H2O, the bitumen has its own peculiar chemical attributes that require considerations that are not necessary for many other oils. For example, Oklahoma doesn't have mountains of sulfur bricks accumulating nor do oils from OK tend to have crap loads of vanadium and nickel which tend to crap up refinery units and thus cause large discounts on price.
I love working on heavy oil projects solely because heavy oils have really interesting chemistry (it's certainly not the weather) but those 'features' that make it interesting to me also make its economics difficult. However, some of those economic problems could have been reduced if folks had spent some more $ on the front side rather than band-aiding problems after the fact.
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