Abstract: Canada’soil sands are an immense resource of crude oil, which play an important role in the North American energy framework. The global financial crisis has had severe implications on the growth of the world economies and presented various challenges to the Canadian oil sand exploration. Though the analysis of the trends and key reasons of oil sand exploration, the result showed that, on a long view, the steady growth of crude oil demand in North American energy framework will be the crucial reason to prompt oil sand exploration.