The rapid increase in attention and interests in unconventional resources have been attributed to their vast occurrences across the globe; the dwindling reserves of conventional resources, and improvements in technology making their extraction more profitable. The occurrence of oil sands in Nigeria has been known for close to a century with estimated reserves of about 43 billion barrels of recoverable crude oil. This resource however is still not commercially developed despite several attempts made by the government. It is therefore presumed that there are myriad of uncertainties surrounding this development as is the case with fossil fuel resources especially unconventional like oil sands. The uncertainties may be due to certain factors including technological, environmental and political. In this exploratory study, firstly these uncertainties associated with the development of oil sands in Nigeria are identified and categorized. Secondly, the system dynamics approach is employed to explore cause-and-effect relationships among the uncertainties in relation to oil sands development. This study is made possible through the funding received from Organization for Women in Sciences for the Developing World (OWSD) and Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA).