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It is natural that the idea of bituminous sand development should be accepted with considerable hesitancy. It does not conform with the established order of things.
—Karl A. Clark, The Bituminous Sands of Alberta, 1929
To begin to understand Alberta, you really have to understand the power of the sun and the sky, which seem to take up a disproportionate amount of space here. There aren’t many places where, in a single twelve-hour period, you can see the northern lights in full regalia and a rainbow so huge and vivid that all seven colors appear to vibrate in concentric neon arcs—each band distinct from the next. So big and open is the country, and so clear and dominant the sky, that these phenomena may accompany you for hours, even as you travel at highway speed.
Alberta lies due north of Montana and due south of the Northwest Territories; it is roughly the size of Texas, and the two have a lot in common. Like Texas, Alberta is a kind of energy vortex: along with wide-open spaces and a patriotic allegiance to the petroleum industry, it shares with its American counterpart a painful familiarity with natural disasters, including tornadoes, hailstorms, floods, and fires. Hardworking and independent-minded, Alberta, too, prides itself on a mythic legacy built around cattle, horses, cowboys, and oil, further energized by deep wells of “get ’er done” can-do-itiveness, evangelical Christianity, and cantankerous alienation from its national capital. To give an idea just how alienated Alberta has been from the federal government, consider a snow sculpture erected on the campus quad during the University of Alberta’s winter festival in 1981: in response to then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s program to share Alberta’s oil revenue with less-wealthy provinces, Trudeau was depicted on his knees, fellating an oil derrick rising from the crotch of Alberta’s premier. In front of this bracing tableau, also carved in snow, was the caption “TRUDEAU WANTS EVERY DROP.”
But not as much as Alberta does. Those two men may have melted into memory, but the resentment persists, and the number of oil and gas wells in Alberta has ballooned into the hundreds of thousands. In an effort to locate every drop, the province has also been crisscrossed with exploratory seismic lines. Today, they run from horizon to horizon, like meridians on a globe. These random-seeming pathways to nowhere, carved and blasted by geologists assessing the mineral and hydrocarbon potential below, are interrupted only by rivers, beaver dams, and the occasional road, test pit, or drill site. In some places, including around Fort McMurray, the landscape has been crosshatched so tightly by these bulldozed corridors that, from the air, the forest has the appearance of a terraformed waffle. Cutting through these gridworks at oblique angles are man-made rivers of oil and gas in the form of pipelines, and these, too, trace the arc of the earth, out of sight and across the continent. If all of Alberta’s pipelines were lined up end to end, they would span the gap between Fort McMurray and the moon, with enough leftover to wrap the equator. Some of these pipelines are four feet in diameter, and much of the petroleum flowing through them is extracted using unconventional methods like fracking, steam-assisted gravity drainage, and strip-mining.
Fort McMurray plays a central role in this endeavor, and, to this end, it is a one-industry town. That industry revolves around bitumen recovery, upgrading, and transport. Without an appreciation for bitumen and its provisional status in the fossil fuel hierarchy, there is no way to comprehend the phenomenon of Fort McMurray. Bitumen (pronounced BITCH-amin) is a kind of degenerate cousin to crude oil, more commonly known as tar or asphalt. Surrounding Fort McMurray, just below the forest floor, is a bitumen deposit the size of New York State. Sometimes referred to as the Alberta tar sands, or the oil sands, it is one of the biggest known petroleum reserves in the world. In terms of potential barrel volume, it is in a class with Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Iran. But as abundant as it is, there’s a catch: it’s not oil. It is not, strictly speaking, even bitumen; it is what geologists call “bituminous sand.” Bituminous sand is to a barrel of oil what a sandbox soaked in molasses is to a bottle of rum. Even after you’ve dug it out of the ground and separated it from its gritty matrix, you’re no closer to a viable form of energy. It’s still just bitumen—excellent for tarring roofs and paving roads, but so nonflammable you can put out a campfire with it.
More than 300,000 pipelines serve the fossil fuel industry in Alberta.
Though it is possible to find deposits of pure bitumen along the Athabasca River, the overwhelming bulk of it occurs in a mineral aggregate comparable to an exit ramp. According to Oil Sands Magazine, “A typical oil sands deposit contains about 10% bitumen, 5% water and 85% solids.” Those solids are principally quartzite, one of the hardest minerals in the world. Quartzite sand is extraordinarily abrasive, and it is hell on machinery, shovels, dump truck boxes, and pipelines, not to mention the paint job on your truck and your kitchen floor. The process of excavating, separating, and then “upgrading” this pavement-like substance involves elements of strip mining, rock crushing, and steam cleaning—the petrochemical equivalent to squeezing blood from stones. Because of this, there is really no comparison between the petroleum industry in northern Alberta and the petroleum industries in Texas, Saudi Arabia, or any other place, on- or offshore, where oil is drawn from the earth by conventional means.
A bitumen mine is not a place you would let your child play, but it is excavated using equipment familiar to any four-year-old conversant in Tonka technology—and with a similar grandiosity of ambition. In order to access the bitumen, the forest above it must first be removed. In industry parlance, this living material is referred to as “overburden,” and the machine used to scrape it off is a Caterpillar D11 bulldozer. The D11 weighs more than a hundred tons, and its blade is twenty-two feet wide; it can plow down a forest like mowing a lawn. But this is entirely in keeping with the scale of things up here; working alongside the D11s are Komatsu D575s, which are even bigger. Once the forest has been removed, enormous electric shovels excavate the bituminous sand in boulder-sized chunks that can weigh a hundred tons and occasionally contain complete dinosaur fossils from the Cretaceous Period. These garage-sized payloads are dumped into a “hauler,” and the Caterpillar T797 hauler is one of the biggest dump trucks in the world. It is three stories tall and weighs four hundred tons—unloaded. There are hundreds of machines like this operating in the mines north of Fort McMurray. Far too large for ordinary highways, they must be transported north in pieces. It takes twelve oversized semi loads traveling with escorts to move the component parts of a single hauler. The tires alone are thirteen feet tall and cost $85,000 apiece. When one of them catches on fire—something that happens more often than one might expect, due to the terrific friction their loads generate—it must be deflated from a safe distance with a rifle bullet. Should one of these six-ton tires explode on its own, it will impact its surroundings like a powerful bomb. The hauler’s job is to carry the raw bituminous sand over to the “crusher,” a kind of mechanical black hole composed of two gigantic, continuously turning studded cylinders. In an effort to articulate the inexorable voracity of this device, one employee explained to me that a crusher “can consume a city bus in three seconds.”
Hauler trucks at work in a mine north of Fort McMurray
The environment these behemoths are currently dismantling is an icebound netherworld as seen through the eyes of Sebastião Salgado, Edward Burtynsky, or J. M. W. Turner: mile upon mile of black and ransacked earth pocked with stadium-swallowing pits and dead, discolored lakes guarded by scarecrows in cast-off rain gear and overseen by flaming stacks and fuming refineries, the whole laced together by circuit board mazes of dirt roads and piping, patrolled by building-sized machines that, enormous as they are, appear dwarfed by the wastelands they have made. The tailings ponds alone cover well over a hundred square miles and contain more than a quarter of a trillion gallons of contaminated water and effluent from the bitumen upgrading process. There is no place for this toxic sludge to go except into the soil, or the air, or, if one of the massive earthen dams should fail, into the Athabasca River. For decades, cancer rates have been abnormally high in the downstream community of Fort Chipewyan. Even people gainfully employed in those mines compare them to Mordor. Grouped near Syncrude’s upgrading plant, like an ancient temple complex, are bright yellow ziggurats of solid sulphur bigger than the Pyramids at Giza. Dwarfing even these is Syncrude’s six-hundred-foot-tall flare stack; Suncor, just a few miles away, has one too. In 2016, these skyscraping, fire-breathing gnomons were the tallest man-made things for a thousand miles in any direction.
At this scale, humans simply disappear.
Underappreciated by most of us down south is the fact that all of this—man and machine alike—must function year-round, twenty-four hours a day, across some of the world’s most extreme temperature fluctuations. Untreated diesel fuel begins to gel at 15°F and bulldozer blades can shatter at -35°F, but Fort McMurray sees temperatures in the -40s every winter and has posted lows in the -60s. The fire department’s pumper trucks have built-in heaters to keep the water from freezing en route to a call. And yet, with increasing regularity, the region is seeing summer highs in the 90s. Extremes like this put terrific stress not just on metals, but also on hydraulic hoses, lubricated gears, and any fluid that must be kept flowing at a consistent viscosity. Of course, it is particularly tough on human beings; every plant has dedicated crews who do nothing but build scaffolding, often outside and in all weathers. There, a five-knot zephyr will make -25°F, a routine winter temperature in Fort McMurray, feel like -40°F, a temperature at which exposed flesh and eyeballs freeze in minutes. Shifts are typically ten to twelve hours long, and, in winter, the sun is up for only seven hours a day; even at noon, it sulks on the horizon offering no sensible heat.
But when a stiff north wind carries smoke from the cokers up the river into town, there are few complaints. Most just sniff and say, “Smells like money.”
The Alberta government has always worked closely with the fossil fuel industry, to the point where it can be difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. Together, they have struggled for a century to come up with a brand for all that potential lying just beneath the forest floor. “Nature’s Supreme Gift to Industry” was floated in the 1920s, but it didn’t catch on. Another worthy effort was the “Magic Sand-Pile” campaign. Aimed at American investors and inventors, the ad ran in a 1947 issue of Fortune magazine with the slogan “ALBERTA has WHAT YOUR BUSINESS needs!” (Low taxes, generous subsidies, and minimal oversight—enticements known today as the “Alberta Advantage.”) The ad copy reads like a call for industrial homesteaders.
Despite its stirring language and double-barreled promise of freedom, the prospect of something bordering on the alchemical buried in a magic sandpile seven hundred miles north of Great Falls was a bit too rich, even for American capitalists and engineers. Besides, there was an awful lot of actual oil to be found down south—not only in Texas, Oklahoma, and California, but in southern Alberta. By 1930, the United States was already veined with more than 100,000 miles of oil pipelines carrying a billion barrels of crude oil annually.
Reinventing and rebranding unwanted things has been a necessary survival strategy in western Canada, but transforming the sow’s ear of bituminous sand into the silk purse of Syncrude Sweet Blend is its greatest achievement yet. In language that sounds like a special offer from Starbucks, one oil industry data site describes “this typical light sweet synthetic crude [as] a bottomless blend of hydrotreated naphtha, distillate, and gasoil fractions.” And, like rendering something as undrinkable as coffee beans into a Dark Chocolate Melted Truffle Mocha, the process of rendering something as unburnable as tar-coated sand into Syncrude Sweet Blend, Western Canadian Select, or Albian Premium requires a lot of heat and pressure.
Whatever one chooses to call the petroleum residue beneath Fort McMurray, it’s not oil—not anymore. Had the industry discovered it 50 million years ago, they could have had more than a trillion barrels of crude oil on their hands, a bonanza by which Saudi Arabia’s reserves would pale in comparison. But over thousands of millennia, much of that sweet crude was impacted by inexorable natural forces that caused it to migrate upward and eastward through a huge, geological depression called the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin. This continental reservoir, formerly an inland sea, contains generous deposits of oil, gas, and bitumen that inform much of the geology between the Rocky Mountains and the Precambrian Shield (that long, broad, flat stretch west of the Great Lakes).
By the time this wayward oil found its way into an England-sized sandstone layer known as the McMurray Formation, just beneath the Athabasca Plain, it had already been discovered. Not by the British or the Americans, but by bacteria. Like a plague of mice in a cheese cellar, this nano army raided the continent’s greatest petroleum reserve and left behind only wrappers and rinds. These unlikely predators, representing several different genera, are otherworldly creatures that nourish themselves on hydrocarbons, survive without oxygen, and off-gas methane (one of the only characteristics we share besides an appetite for crude oil). Small as they are, they appear to be the masters of a poorly understood domain known to geochemists as the “deep biosphere.” Situated at the lower limits of habitability, between the lifeless depths of Earth’s crust and the surface realms of sunlight and oxygen, inhabitants of the deep biosphere have been found more than a mile underground and at temperatures that exceed the boiling point. By all accounts, this biome is not only vast but teeming. As Steve Larter, a fellow of the Royal Society who occupies the Canada Research Chair in Geochemistry at the University of Calgary, wrote in 2014, “The oil sands and heavy-oil belts of the world represent the most viable access point to the deep biosphere, which from a cell-balance perspective is the largest biome on the planet.”
When Larter tried to calculate how many of these hydrocarbon-eating “extremophiles” inhabited the bitumen deposits surrounding Fort McMurray, the number he arrived at was “well in excess of 10 to the 23rd”—trillions upon quadrillions upon quintillions of hungry creatures thriving in one of our planet’s most hostile environments. Given their numbers and their impact, surprisingly little is known about them; their only familiar requirement is water. Nonetheless, they have taken a devastating toll. Approaching this ancient oil with the diligence and discernment of a petroleum engineer, these tiny multitudes cherry-picked the simpler, “sweeter,” more marketable hydrocarbons, leaving behind the longer, more complex molecules laden with tarry asphaltenes, resins, salts, heavy metals, and complex sulphur compounds, among other unsavory impurities. Fifty million years on, with the low-hanging fruit largely gone, Alberta has inherited the dregs, and oil refiners don’t care for it any more than those intrepid microbes do.
In order to make this hydrocarbon residuum resemble something contemporary oil refineries can actually process, and that foreign markets are willing to buy, it must be artificially restored to its pre-degraded state—in other words, forced back in time. It has been said that helicopters don’t fly; they beat the air into submission. The same can be said of the effort required to turn bitumen back into a usable, marketable fuel. It takes two tons of bituminous sand to make a single barrel of bitumen, and, at room temperature, bitumen pours about as well as Nutella. To be capable of ignition, liquid bitumen (the only petroleum product that is heavier than water) must be preheated well past the boiling point. To make it flow through a pipe, it must either be heated or blended with a diluting agent. These diluents are usually natural gas condensates or other industrial thinners, all of which are highly toxic and explosive. Diluted bitumen—“dilbit”—will remain fluid only under sealed conditions in a tank or a pipeline. In the event of a spill or other exposure, the added diluent will evaporate (or burn) off almost immediately, leaving the bitumen to glom on to the nearest firm surface. In the case of a major rupture in Enbridge’s Line 6B in 2010, the nearest firm surface was the bottom of the Kalamazoo River. The million-gallon (24,000-barrel) spill impacted forty miles of waterway near Marshall, Michigan, and took five years and more than a billion dollars to mitigate (“clean up” being a misnomer here), making it the most expensive inland petroleum spill in history. The market value of the spilled dilbit was less than 1/1000th of the mitigation cost.[*1]
While the end products rendered from bitumen are ultimately useful, taking the form of synthetic crude oil, diesel fuel, and feedstock for other petroleum products, its journey into a form recognizable to a petroleum engineer or a southern oil buyer is an arduous and expensive one, requiring enormous quantities of water, chemicals, and foreign capital. But most of all, it takes brute force, and that brute force is fire. The preferred extraction method, which now accounts for about 80 percent of the region’s bitumen production, is steam-assisted gravity drainage, or SAG-D. SAG-D involves layered arrays of wellbores and piping through which steam is injected, in situ, in order to melt the bitumen directly out of its confusion of sand and clay. In both SAG-D and surface mining operations, the steam used to melt the bitumen is heated with natural gas, and the quantities required to do this are astounding.
Natural gas, which is about 80 percent methane, is measured, not in gallons or barrels, but in cubic feet. According to Canada’s National Energy Board, the bitumen industry uses more than 2 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day (the energy equivalent of 350,000 barrels of oil), for the sole purpose of separating bitumen from sand. Canada is the fourth-largest producer of natural gas in the world, and in 2017 nearly a third of Canada’s total production was devoted to this purpose. Natural gas, it must be said, is an organic fuel that requires minimal refining, yet the result of this colossal energy input is a substance still so dense with impurities that it does not burn. Even after it has been separated from the sand, bitumen requires an additional series of radical, heat-intensive interventions in order to liberate the oil and gas molecules bound up in the tar.
The industry knows this, and it has not been kind. Bitumen and its derivatives are steeply discounted on the open market. One way to measure the value and desirability of a fuel is to calculate its energy return on investment, or EROI. Conventional fuels like crude oil or natural gas have high EROI ratings, generating close to thirty units of energy for every unit of energy used to extract them. Alberta bitumen has an EROI of about six to one for surface mining, and three to one for steam-assisted gravity drainage—ratios so marginal that no conventional petroleum producer would consider them. Given these obstacles, a layperson would be hard pressed to make the business case for bitumen, especially when there is still so much flowing oil in the world.
Alberta has taken these liabilities into account and, in order for the bitumen industry to be even remotely profitable, four conditions must be met: conventional oil must be trading above $50 a barrel; the natural resources needed to produce it (fresh water, natural gas, and the boreal forest ecosystem) must be had for next to nothing; the industry itself must be heavily subsidized; and exploration costs must be nil.[*2] There is a fifth condition, exploited not just by the bitumen industry but by the entire burning world: no consequences for emissions.
This is what Alberta has built and bet its economy on, with mixed results.
By the early 2000s, these conditions had proved sufficiently favorable to Syncrude and Suncor—and, more recently, to multinationals like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Conoco, Royal Dutch Shell, France’s Total, Norway’s Statoil, China’s Sinopec, and the joint Chinese- and Canadian-owned Husky Energy (among others)—that all of them staked billion-dollar claims in these northern woods, a thousand miles from the nearest tidewater port or major market. Because of these companies, along with their colleagues, competitors, and the generous support of the Canadian and Alberta governments, Fort McMurray has become the center of the largest, most expensive, most energy-intensive hydrocarbon recovery project on Earth. A rough estimate of investment to date is half a trillion dollars.