A rapidly expanding oil sands industry and a dwindling supply of feedstock for Alberta’s ethane-based petrochemical industry have stimulated interest in evaluating bitumen for producing a broad slate of refined products, including petrochemicals. Two industry/government studies evaluated different process schemes for integrating oil sands, refining, and petrochemical operations and convert heavy gas oils into both refined products and petro-chemicals. Since market demand for fuels and refined products far exceeds that for petrochemicals, the performance character-istics of the heavy oil conversion processes are important to op-timize the volume ratios of the products to meet market volume demands. The paper reviews different heavy oil processing tech-nologies focusing on olefin to fuel product ratios and flexibility to change these ratios. The review includes conventional non-catalytic thermal (steam) cracking, as well as catalytic processes. These technologies are at different stages of commercial devel-opment for production of fuels and olefins, and must be eval-uated and adapted to meet Alberta’s aromatic bitumen-derived heavy gas oils. Work is underway in an industry/government study towards developing an integrated process for the combined production of refined fuels and petrochemical feedstocks. In ad-dition, two workshops were held in February 2005 to address the business and regulatory gaps that needed to be addressed before such a process can be commercialized; the results from the work-shops will also be discussed in the paper.