Ask most people and they'd probably tell you that the world's largest hydrocarbon deposit is the giant Ghawar oilfield in eastern Saudi Arabia, which has been pumping out crude at the rate of millions of barrels a day for decades now.
They'd be wrong. The biggest known deposit is actually the Athabaska tar sands in the far north of Alberta in Canada.
It's a wild place, covered with boreal forest and inhabited by grizzly bears, where winter temperatures can fall as low as minus 50 degress Celsius.
The folk prepared to extract oil from such a remote place are a tough, unsentimental bunch. There isn't much for them to do except work. A petroleum geologist employed on one project in the area once told Monitor that the highlight of the month came when the mobile bordello rolled into camp just after payday.
In the back of a truck divided into compartments, half a dozen hard-working ladies of the night would offer their services to the hundreds of lonely roughnecks queuing patiently outside, pay packets clutched in their hands. The girls made a fortune, but few ever lasted more than one season on the road.
Times change, and these days it's not so likely to be the oil workers getting diddled for their money in Athabaska, but investors in tar sands projects.