From an article from the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) on the effects of the fall in oil prices on the Canadian economy comes this economic story:
The existence of bitumen around Fort McMurray has been known since
at least the 19th century. Early last century, prospectors tried to
market it for paving roads. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Canadian
oil companies, led by those now called Suncor Energy Inc. and Syncrude,
began developing open-pit mines to extract it.
Yet despite the huge scale of the reserve, the global energy sector
paid relatively little notice due to the high cost of producing
petroleum from the sands. With the price of oil dropping to as low as
$10.72 a barrel in 1998, the investment wasn't worthwhile.
Then the game changed.
Advances in technology, including improvements in extracting bitumen
using steam, made the process more efficient. The availability of easy
credit fueled ever bigger investments. The Iraq war, coupled with the
unpredictability of Hugo Chávez's Venezuela, made reserves in a
politically stable country like Canada more attractive. And as the
global economy boomed, the price of oil soared, more than covering the
costs of production.
Major oil companies from around the world, along with big Canadian
firms, poured money into the oil sands. Annual spending, including both
new construction and the expenses to operate the huge sites, nearly
quintupled to a planned $34.6 billion in 2008, from $7 billion in 2003,
according to the Oil Sands Developers Group.
But with the impact the global recession has had on oil prices, exploration and production activities have been curtailed. This is especially so in Canada, where the cost of getting usable oil from the tar sands is very high
as the following picture from the article shows.
The reason we are "dependent" on oil from OPEC countries is that their oil is much cheaper to extract and prepare into usable products. It's simply not profitable to go after oil in tar sands, shale oil, etc. at lower prices. Folks who would like American society to be less "dependent" on foreign oil should have another reason to fear the recession: there's little reason to find new sources of oil and there's little incentive to search for alternative energies.