How to Use bitumen in a Sentence
bitumen
noun-
The industry uses gas to loosen the hard bitumen rock, as well as to heat water used in the process.
—Robert Tuttle, Bloomberg.com, 19 May 2017
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But the presence of bitumen is unusual and the most likely reason is to slow the decay of the teeth.
—Jason Daley, Smithsonian, 11 Apr. 2017
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But the presence of bitumen is unusual and the most likely reason is to slow the decay of the teeth.
—Jason Daley, Smithsonian, 11 Apr. 2017
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Along with the tree oils and resin, the scientists found beeswax, animal fats, and bitumen.
—Peter Weber, The Week, 2 Feb. 2023
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And in the Bible, Noah sealed his arc with bitumen to make the vessel more hydrodynamic.
—Adrienne Bernhard, Popular Mechanics, 7 Apr. 2020
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Instead, oil companies must steam or mine a sticky, tar-like substance called bitumen out of the ground.
—Michael J. Coren, Quartz, 29 Apr. 2020
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As is the case in Michigan, the bitumen will persist in the water table for the foreseeable future.
—Charles P. Pierce, Esquire, 30 Jan. 2017
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To extract bitumen from the sand, oil companies heat it and then treat it in a slurry of water and solvents.
—NBC News, 22 Nov. 2021
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Black, sticky, and viscous, bitumen is a form of petroleum found in areas around the Dead Sea.
—National Geographic, 10 Dec. 2019
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Apothecaries had long believed the black substance found on mummies was bitumen from the Red Sea that could be used to cure coughs, heal broken bones or break fevers.
—Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi, Discover Magazine, 26 July 2022
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In the southeast corner of the city, the researchers unearthed an industrial complex that may have been used to forge bronze or bitumen objects.
—Gabe Allen, Discover Magazine, 28 June 2022
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All that’s left today of an ancient boat discovered in 2018 in what was formerly Uruk is the bitumen, black tar that once coated its framework of reeds, palm leaves, or wood.
—Kiona N. Smith, Ars Technica, 8 Apr. 2022
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Monty threw that carburetor across the driveway and down the street, crashing into the bitumen and fully unbuckling in front of the townhouse where my aunt, just a few years ago, used to live.
—Nicole Walker, Longreads, 10 Aug. 2020
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The bitumen road out of town soon turns to dirt, and farmhouses on big wheat properties are dotted every several miles.
—Jacqueline Williams, New York Times, 7 Mar. 2018
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In other parts of Alberta, where the sands are too deep to mine, the bitumen is melted in place and extracted through wells by pumping high-pressure steam underground.
—NBC News, 22 Nov. 2021
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The company had anticipated that some of the bitumen shipped from the oil sands would be loaded onto tankers at ports in eastern Canada for shipment to the United States.
—Ian Austen, New York Times, 5 Oct. 2017
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Yarrabah, which is wedged between mountainous rain forest and the Coral Sea, first got electricity in the 1960s, followed by its first bitumen road, residents say.
—Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, New York Times, 24 Jan. 2016
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For the women who migrated to work in the bitumen-rich tar sands of northern Alberta in the early 21st century, there were many ways for the gritty environment to turn toxic.
—Michael Cavna, Washington Post, 6 Oct. 2022
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Once further layers of armored plating and bitumen are applied, a single meter weighs 70 kg.
—WIRED, 23 Sep. 2022
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Shopkeepers resort to buying sacks of bitumen and filling in the potholes outside their premises themselves.
—Sara Miller Llana, The Christian Science Monitor, 19 June 2017
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Fed by air or oxygen pumped into the ground, the fire releases gases that can push oil toward wells, and its heat can soften tarlike bitumens and other heavy oils, making them easier to pump.
—Eric Hand, Science | AAAS, 6 Feb. 2020
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The binding agent in traditional asphalt paving is a black sticky substance called bitumen, produced by oil refining.
—Lindsey McGinnis, The Christian Science Monitor, 14 Sep. 2020
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Tapping new wells of thick Canadian bitumen and processing it into crude is expensive, but the break-even oil price for operating an existing one can be as low as $25.
—The Economist, 27 Feb. 2020
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Utah has the nation’s largest deposits of raw oil sand, or bitumen — enough to produce as much as 15 billion barrels of oil and potentially more, according to the Utah Geological Survey.
—Clifford Krauss, The Seattle Times, 27 Aug. 2018
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Officials said a mixture of bitumen, straw and plywood in the roof cavity of the seven-story structure was continuing to burn and firefighters could not properly access the area.
—Washington Post, 23 Oct. 2019
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Ours is bare, with a rubbery gray coating occasionally interrupted by strips of plain black bitumen.
—Kate Knibbs, Wired, 23 June 2020
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The rest were showing physical stuff — works made not only from paint, but also scrap metal, elephant dung, taxidermied pigeons, hairdressers’ endpapers, wax, wool, black soap and bitumen.
—Washington Post, 18 Dec. 2021
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But in addition to being a fossil fuel, bitumen is difficult to extract and energy-intensive to process.
—Clifford Krauss, New York Times, 24 Feb. 2020
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The analysis revealed traces of animal fats, beeswax, vegetable oils, and bitumen along with multiple plant resins—ingredients that were probably mixed and heated to form ointments.
—Byandrew Curry, science.org, 1 Feb. 2023
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Thinners in the thick, sludgy, diluted bitumen evaporated, causing significant amounts of the oil to sink to the river bottom, clump with sediments and other materials, and complicate the cleanup.
—Keith Matheny, Detroit Free Press, 19 June 2020
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'bitumen.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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