As quickly as you arrive within the Alberta boomtown of Fort McMurray you may odor the oil — it’s like a pointy cousin to sizzling asphalt.
You can see it too — proof of its extraction is seen within the few tailings ponds alongside the freeway north of city, the place plumes of exhaust drift, ever increasing above refineries.
This is the oilsands — the home of billions of barrels of tarry crude oil that lies underneath 142,000 square kilometres of northern Alberta, driving the native economic system and bolstering provincial budgets.
But it’s not till you’re within the air the scope of the oilsands turns into clear — a sprawling panorama teeming with huge vans outfitted with tires taller than two F-150 vans stacked collectively.
As the solar rose over the frozen earth final winter, The Narwhal flew to see the oilsands mines. On our manner out of the town the pilot pointed to land cleared for a subdivision that hasn’t been constructed — an indication the booms of the previous, when there have been extra staff than housing, may not come again.
Soon the pink-hued snow provides option to a moonscape the place boreal forest is being scraped away.
Even then, it’s onerous to understand what you see.
Off to the east, the Suncor Base Plant spreads pipes and tubes like fingers throughout an enormous industrial advanced, crawling with a median of 6,000 staff every day.
To the northwest are Syncrude’s Mildred Lake amenities, an analogous maze of pipelines and stacks, the place bitumen is diluted and upgraded earlier than being despatched by pipeline to refineries like these in Edmonton, some 500 kilometres away.
The scale is tough to understand. Reference factors assist — these huge dump vans are specks on the panorama, the buildings and trailers even smaller. It helps snap the thoughts into focus.
But that view encompasses solely two of the eight oilsands mines at present in operation.
People had recognized concerning the oilsands for hundreds of years earlier than anybody began to consider methods to dig them up. In the Nineteen Fifties, a plan emerged to detonate a nuclear bomb under the crude oil deposits.
That plan fizzled and in 1967 Great Canadian Oil Sands, now Suncor Energy, launched the world’s first large-scale oilsands open-pit mine.
The objective has remained the identical within the a long time since: extract the oily sand from under the floor. It’s blended with water and sometimes chemical substances and cooked in separators to launch the precious oil. The ensuing mixture of sand, silt, clay, water, residual hydrocarbons and chemical substances are dumped in clay-lined pits to settle.
There are lakes of mine tailings in varied states — from young pits of muddy bitumen- and-chemical-soaked water, to mature tailings ripe with the shiny sheen of oil, to pits back-filled with sand for reclamation.
If you had been to take the entire tailings ponds from the entire oilsands mines, they’d cowl an space twice the scale of Vancouver, 300 sq. kilometres.
They’re probably not ponds — these industry-made reservoirs retailer practically 1.4 trillion litres of byproducts from the mining of oilsands, together with arsenic, naphthenic acids, mercury, lead and polycyclic fragrant hydrocarbons.
While there has by no means been a complete federal research, many individuals consider these chemical substances are linked to increased charges of uncommon cancers in close by Fort Chipewyan (the Alberta authorities’s information exhibits “higher than expected” charges of bile duct most cancers within the area).
The tailings ponds are ever rising. A recent analysis from the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society discovered Suncor’s Fort Hills oilsands mine growth will add 60 sq. kilometres of latest tailings ponds over the mission’s lifetime — an space giant sufficient to cowl the island of Manhattan.
The evaluation additionally estimated the mine will end in 732 million cubic metres — 300,000 Olympic swimming swimming pools — of latest tailings fluid.
This is only a fraction of oilsands exercise. Approximately 80 per cent of Alberta’s oilsands reserves are so deeply buried it could actually solely be extracted by the a lot smaller footprint of what’s often known as in-situ extraction, most frequently by pumping sizzling steam deep into the oil deposit in a know-how often known as steam assisted gravity drainage. The infusion of steam melts the oil, permitting it to be drawn as much as the floor.
But it’s the open-pit mines the place the timber, muskeg and layers of earth are methodically eliminated — so deeply Niagara Falls could possibly be tucked neatly under the floor.
The soil construction right here has been forming for thousands and thousands of years. It’s so historical an oilsands employee accidentally dug up a 112-million-year-old dinosaur, Alberta’s oldest, at Suncor’s Millennium mine in 2011. Those layers are moved truckload by truckload, to get on the tar-like oil trapped in grime.
Whether from open-pit mines or in-situ extraction, the ensuing tarry substance is just too viscous and isn’t but marketable. Upgrading can contain making the bitumen much less thick (changing it to what’s often known as “dilbit”) so it may be transported by pipeline to refineries throughout North America.
Refineries basically distill the oil into increased worth petroleum merchandise — like gasoline, diesel, lubricating oil and jet gas.
The course of brings super wealth to the businesses who produce it — relying on the worth of a barrel — and the operations fatten Alberta’s price range in eye-watering methods.
For the fiscal yr 2022-2023, provincial revenues from the oilsands — together with restoration from in-situ extraction that doesn’t contain open pit mines — amounted to almost $17 billion, the most important slice of Alberta’s monetary pie for the yr.
No matter your perspective, it’s onerous to take all of it in.
