The mission of the Centre is to promote responsible development of technologies to convert worldwide heavy oil, oil sands, bitumen, oil shale and residuum resources in an efficient, economical and environmentally sound way to high value clean products for the 21st century.

The International Centre for Heavy Hydrocarbons (ICHH) is the successor organization to the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) Centre for Heavy Crude and Tar Sands. On October 26, 1998, the UNITAR Centre Governing Board voted:

1. to continue a Centre with a broader scope better reflecting industry and sponsoring company goals, and
2. to disassociate from UNITAR. The UNITAR Centre had been unique as it was the first all industry supported Centre, established in 1981.

We are also asking individuals to contribute to the growing collection of electronic information on heavy hydrocarbons. We are looking for photographs, lessons learned, case studies, tours of historic heavy oil producing areas, tours of production sites and upgraders / refineries, and to build simple electronic explanations with graphics for educating school children and the public. We need people to help convert conference proceedings and studies to electronic copy. We also need volunteer technical translators for English to Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, and Russian.