Imagine Saudi Arabia in Canada, unthinkable ? think again! The tar sands, a geological feature unique in the world, are stretching over a 75 000 square kilometer area and contain more than 3000 billion of tons of hydrocarbons whose 300 billions tons are exploitable. This natural resource moved Canada ahead of oil producing countries, just behind Saudi Arabia! A manna for some, but a real nightmare for others. According to environmentalists the oil iproducedd in Alberta's tar sands is the dirtiest in the world. Welcome into the country of colossal excess, where each grain of sand contains gold, black gold that is.
Saudi...Alberta, financial boom and ecological disaster... Photos and text ŠPatrice Halley/LightMediation Contact - Thierry Tinacci LightMediation Photo Agency +33 (0)6 61 80 57 21 thierry@lightmediation.com
1604-06: Oil reserve volume in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada's tar sands are second in the world. If new project expansions go ahead as planned, daily production of oil will rise from 1.1 million to 6 million barrels per day by 2020.
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-01: Shelley Schwartz drives a 3600 horsepower truck during her 12-hour shift as a heavy equipment operator. / Canada / Fort McMurray
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-02: Shelley Schwartz drives a 3600 horsepower truck during her 12-hour shift as a heavy equipment operator. / Canada / Fort McMurray
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-03: Shelley Schwartz drives a 3600 horsepower truck during her 12-hour shift as a heavy equipment operator. / Canada / Fort McMurray
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-04: Didi Umperville, a young Cree woman, is a welder at Syncrude. A non-traditional job for a woman, Didi is completing her journeyman's ticket among mostly
1604-02: Shelley Schwartz drives a 3600 horsepower truck during her 12-hour shift as a heavy equipment operator.
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-05: Oil reserve volume in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada's tar sands are second in the world. If new project expansions go ahead as planned, daily
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-06: Oil reserve volume in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada's tar sands are second in the world. If new project expansions go ahead as planned, daily
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-07: At the epicentre of numerous issues in Fort MacMurray, environmental impact is a national challenge. Land reclamation processes, and
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-08: At the epicentre of numerous issues in Fort MacMurray, environmental impact is a national challenge. Land reclamation processes, and contamination
1604-15: The cranes put four shovel loads (100 tonnes each) of sands into the dump truck to be hauled to the refinery.
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-09: Didi Umperville, a young Cree woman, is a welder at Syncrude. A non-traditional job for a woman, Didi is completing her journeyman's ticket among mostly
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-10: Each $5 million truck hauls 400 tonnes of tar sand per load. Each tire costs $45 000. The trucks operate 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-11: Each $5 million truck hauls 400 tonnes of tar sand per load. Each tire costs $45 000. The trucks operate 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-12: Each $5 million truck hauls 400 tonnes of tar sand per load. Each tire costs $45 000. The trucks operate 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.
1604-21: Workers' accomodations near the tar sands north of Fort McMurray.
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-13: Each $5 million truck hauls 400 tonnes of tar sand per load. Each tire costs $45 000. The trucks operate 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. / Canada / Fort
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-14: Each $5 million truck hauls 400 tonnes of tar sand per load. Each tire costs $45 000. The trucks operate 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. / Canada /
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-15: The cranes put four shovel loads (100 tonnes each) of sands into the dump truck to be hauled to the refinery. / Canada / Fort McMurray
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-16: At the epicentre of numerous issues in Fort MacMurray, environmental impact is a national challenge. Land reclamation processes, and contamination
1604-25: Dump trucks drive to the smelter, where sand is crushed, cooked and processed into a slurry. It is then pumped 35 km by pipeline to the main plants.
1604-31: Physician Michel SauvĂŠ says three quarters of his patients work for the industry. He complains they have the same number of doctors as they did six years ago, but the population has doubled.
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-17: Growth of the oil sands in the past decade may be meeting international demand for crude, but civic costs of the oil boom seem almost insurmountable. In
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-18: Melissa Blake is the mayor of Fort McMurray iin the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo. Mrs Blake lists land for housing, schools and health care centres
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-19: Heavy equipment operator Michel Savard drove 4500 km from Montreal with his fifth wheel to find a job. He now lives in his fifth wheel in an RV park.
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-20: Real Doucet is senior vice-president with Canadian Natural Resources Limited, one of several companies with new oil sands developments north of Fort
1604-10: Each $5 million truck hauls 400 tonnes of tar sand per load. Each tire costs $45 000. The trucks operate 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-21: Workers' accomodations near the tar sands north of Fort McMurray. / Canada / Fort McMurray
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-22: Oil reserve volume in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada's tar sands are second in the world. Uninhibited growth in the past decade is meeting
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-23: Industry pays Diversified Transportation Ltd. to transport workers between work and home in the city. / Canada / Fort McMurray
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-24: Traffic crawls on Highway 63 north of Fort McMurray. The road, in need of major updrading, is littered with white industry trucks as workers travel nearly an hour
1604-05: Oil reserve volume in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada's tar sands are second in the world. If new project expansions go ahead as planned, daily production of oil will rise from 1.1 million to 6 million barrels per day by 2020.
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-25: Dump trucks drive to the smelter, where sand is crushed, cooked and processed into a slurry. It is then pumped 35 km by pipeline to the main plants. /
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-26: Dump trucks drive to the smelter, where sand is crushed, cooked and processed into a slurry. It is then pumped 35 km by pipeline to the main plants. /
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-27: Dump trucks drive to the smelter, where sand is crushed, cooked and processed into a slurry. It is then pumped 35 km by pipeline to the main plants. /
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-28: In response to huge numbers of requests, the industry has organized tours of the tar sands. / Canada / Fort McMurray
1604-19: Heavy equipment operator Michel Savard drove 4500 km from Montreal with his fifth wheel to find a job. He now lives in his fifth wheel in an RV park. Rent for an RV hook-up is $950 per month.
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-29: In response to huge numbers of requests, the industry has organized tours of the tar sands. / Canada / Fort McMurray
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-30: Oil reserve volume in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada's tar sands are second in the world. Uninhibited growth in the past decade is meeting
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-31: Physician Michel SauvĂŠ says three quarters of his patients work for the industry. He complains they have the same number of doctors as they did six years
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-32: Workers are scarce. The service industry faces a major crisis of staff shortage. Fast food restaurants and gas stations offer incentives and wages more than
1604-07: At the epicentre of numerous issues in Fort MacMurray, environmental impact is a national challenge. Land reclamation processes, and contamination and destruction of water and habitat are controversial. These tar sands are also the world's dirtiest, creating five times more greenhouse gases than conventional crude production. Emissions account for 12% of Canada's cap under the Kyoto Protocol.
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-33: The housing shortage is extreme. Bachelor apartments rent for at least $1100 per month. / Canada / Fort McMurray
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-34: Buffalo sculptures erected by Syncrude to commemorate the reintroduction of Wood Buffalo to the area. / Canada / Fort McMurray
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-35: Oil reserve volume in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada's tar sands are second in the world. Uninhibited growth in the past decade is meeting
Fort McMurray: Saudi Arabia of the North / 1604-36: A buffalo ranch 40 km north of Fort McMurray. The ranch is a joint venture between Syncrude, the world's largest producer of light-sweet crude oil, and the
1604-27: Dump trucks drive to the smelter, where sand is crushed, cooked and processed into a slurry. It is then pumped 35 km by pipeline to the main plants.
1604-37: A buffalo ranch 40 km north of Fort McMurray. The ranch is a joint venture between Syncrude, the world's largest producer of light-sweet crude oil, and the Fort McKay First Nation. The ranch is 340 hectares and is one of Syncrude's reclamation projects, meant to restore the land to a level equal to pre-mining conditions.
Saudi...Alberta, financial boom and ecological disaster... Imagine an exploitation that would stretch its activity on 500 square kilometers, roughly the size of the principality of Andorra, to extract oil from a several hundred meters deep ancient sea. The oil sand of the Athabasca have recently made Alberta and Canada a global force in petroleum production and the little town of Fort McMurray (population 56,000) became the center of this black gold rush. The unique geological phenomenon of tar sands extends on an area covering 75 000 square kilometers between the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, that contains an estimated 3000 billion tons of hydrocarbons. The petroleum extracted is known as bitumen. Originally, Aboriginals who used the bitumen to seal their birch bark canoes indicated the sites to the Hudson's Bay Company traders around the 1700's but the first attempt to exploit the potential natural resource was only in the early 20th century and failed. The tar sands oil, trapped between layers of water and sand grains was an unrealistic challenge for investors and engineers until the demand for new sources of oil became reality. In 1967, as the last oil boom was driving record prices up, Suncor started to operate a massive open pit mine and adapted machinery used in the coal industry (gigantic bucketwheels, draglines and crushers) to start producing the
extraction of bitumen that was, at the time, costing up to $ 20,00 CAN a barrel. In the early 1980's, when the price of a barrel dropped at $ 20,00, production simply stagnated. Then, Roger Butler, a chemical engineer originally from England, invented a steam assisted gravity drainage technique (SAG-D) and his revolutionary invention offered the latent industry the possibility to extract previously unrecoverable oil and, with the province of Alberta offering incredible conditions to extraction companies and the growing world demand for oil, the boom was on and Fort McMurray was in the center of it ! Companies like Imperial Oil, Syncrude, Shell Canada and Mobil Oil have moved into tar sands extraction, later followed by new kid on the block in the area CNR&L. The area is also attracting attention from foreign investors and foreign workers. The small town is now an international hub for the oil industry and dignitaries visiting from China, France, Germany, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Of course, Canada's giant neighbor, the United States, the world's largest oil consumer, is also looking greedily at Canada's tar sands activity; with their needs of 20 million barrels per day, the world's first power started to use schmoozing diplomacy to access the previously unwanted bitumen and Canada moved from 23rd on the list of the world's producer to second. Nowadays, the whole area is the epicenter of good and bad superlatives. In her downtown office, Mayor Melissa Blake explains " Fort McMurray is the land of golden opportunities, the average family income is $ 93 000 ! However the city is underdeveloped, and the challenges we are facing are huge. Our infrastructure,
schools, hospital, streets, stores and restaurants are meant to serve a population of 56 000, yet with thousands of migrant workers coming from all around the globe to access the mana, we just can't keep up." In the province, the average minimum wage is $ 5,90 an hour yet in Fort McMurray, Burger King restaurants offer wages of $ 14,00 an hour to flip burgers and Tim Hortons $ 10,50 to pour coffee but nobody is interested because one can simply not live in a community where a bed in a basement rents for $ 750.00 a month with such low income. In the outskirts of "FMM" as locals call the subarctic community, a mobile home sells for $ 300,000 and a very modest house goes for over $ 450,000. There is such a housing shortage that migrant workers do not hesitate to drive across the country and bring their own home on wheels in the hope to secure a job and dodge the high cost of living. "Unfortunately, I realized that I had to rent an RV hook-up for $950,00 per month to live in the street !" says heavy equipment operator Michel Savard, who drove 4500 km from Montreal with his family and their fifth wheel to try find a job in the new Klondike. The town's population now has swollen to 60,000, housing shortage forced companies to build accommodations for their workers, services are stretched beyond their capacity and criminality, prostitution and illegal drugs and alcohol related problems are increasing. The water treatment system is about to fail and while the provincial government lately committed 396 million to help the infrastructure of the Wood-Buffalo municipality to keep up with demand for new schools, swage and waste-water plant and new roads, the numbers never stand. Just looking at the highway that
links Fort McMurray to the province capital's Edmonton makes the visitor realize how obsolete the whole infrastructure is "Three seventy seven kilometers of potholes" comments a local truck driver . Environmental problems are also surfacing. Once ignored both by the government and the industry, issues ranging from land reclamation, water removal from the Athabasca River (to clean the sands in the process of recovering bitumen) tailing ponds and air pollution with increasing greenhouse gas emissions are today's evidence that there is a need for new regulations. A few years ago, the oil sands were considered the energy of despair. Today companies like CNRL which operate with a capital of 8.3 billion and budgeted 25 million hours of labour, paid for 130,000 tonnes of structural steel, three million linear meters of cables and 155,000 cubic meters of concrete show that there is incremental and even infinite hope in the tar sands extraction. The company is chartering its own employees from Calgary and Edmonton on location on its private airstrip and purchase land to build affordable housing for their workers. However, with the arrival of new companies doing more extraction and pollution and bringing more workers, problems are increasing faster than solutions and Fort Mac Murray and the industry may have a long road of challenges ahead as long as the history of the oil sands.
LĂŠgendes 1604-01-02-03: Shelley Schwartz drives a 3600 horsepower truck during her 12-hour shift as a heavy equipment operator. 1604-04: Didi Umperville, a young Cree woman, is a welder at Syncrude. A non-traditional job for a woman, Didi is completing her journeyman's ticket among mostly male colleagues. 1604-05-06: Oil reserve volume in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada's tar sands are second in the world. If new project expansions go ahead as planned, daily production of oil will rise from 1.1 million to 6 million barrels per day by 2020 1604-07-08-16: At the epicentre of numerous issues in Fort MacMurray, environmental impact is a national challenge. Land reclamation processes, and contamination and destruction of water and habitat are controversial. These tar sands are also the world's dirtiest, creating five times more greenhouse gases than conventional crude production. Emissions account for 12% of Canada's cap under the Kyoto Protocol. 1604-09: Didi Umperville, a young Cree woman, is a welder at Syncrude. A non-traditional job for a woman, Didi is completing her journeyman's ticket among mostly male colleagues. 1604-10-11-12-13-14: Each $5 million truck hauls 400 tonnes of tar sand per load. Each tire costs $45 000. The trucks operate 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. 1604-15: The cranes put four shovel loads
(100 tonnes each) of sands into the dump truck to be hauled to the refinery.
international demand, insurmountable civic costs.
1604-17: Growth of the oil sands in the past decade may be meeting international demand for crude, but civic costs of the oil boom seem almost insurmountable. In five years, Fort McMurray's population doubled to 70 000 people, not including 12 000 workers living in camps.
1604-23: Industry pays Diversified Transportation Ltd. to transport workers between work and home in the city.
1604-18: Melissa Blake is the mayor of Fort McMurray iin the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo. Mrs Blake lists land for housing, schools and health care centres are the most pressing concerns for the city. Without infrastructure for residents and workers, plants will not have the workers they need to continue production. She needs about $1 billion, but the province only pledged to give half that amount over 10 years.
but
with
1604-24: Traffic crawls on Highway 63 north of Fort McMurray. The road, in need of major updrading, is littered with white industry trucks as workers travel nearly an hour home during rush hour. 1604-25-26-27: Dump trucks drive to the smelter, where sand is crushed, cooked and processed into a slurry. It is then pumped 35 km by pipeline to the main plants. 1604-28-29: In response to huge numbers of requests, the industry has organized tours of the tar sands.
1604-19: Heavy equipment operator Michel Savard drove 4500 km from Montreal with his fifth wheel to find a job. He now lives in his fifth wheel in an RV park. Rent for an RV hook-up is $950 per month.
1604-30: Oil reserve volume in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada's tar sands are second in the world. Uninhibited growth in the past decade is meeting international demand, but with insurmountable civic costs.
1604-20: Real Doucet is senior vice-president with Canadian Natural Resources Limited, one of several companies with new oil sands developments north of Fort McMurray. He claims if infrastructure is not developed, companies will have to build their own affordable housing.
1604-31: Physician Michel SauvĂŠ says three quarters of his patients work for the industry. He complains they have the same number of doctors as they did six years ago, but the population has doubled.
1604-21: Workers' accomodations near the tar sands north of Fort McMurray. 1604-22: Oil reserve volume in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada's tar sands are second in the world. Uninhibited growth in the past decade is meeting
1604-32: Workers are scarce. The service industry faces a major crisis of staff shortage. Fast food restaurants and gas stations offer incentives and wages more than twice the provincial average. 1604-33: The housing shortage is extreme. Bachelor apartments rent for at least $1100 per month.
1604-34: Buffalo sculptures erected by Syncrude to commemorate the reintroduction of Wood Buffalo to the area. 1604-35: Oil reserve volume in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada's tar sands are second in the world. Uninhibited growth in the past decade is meeting international demand, but with insurmountable civic costs. 1604-36: A buffalo ranch 40 km north of Fort McMurray. The ranch is a joint venture between Syncrude, the world's largest producer of light-sweet crude oil, and the Fort McKay First Nation. The ranch is 340 hectares and is one of Syncrude's reclamation projects, meant to restore the land to a level equal to pre-mining conditions. 1604-37: A buffalo ranch 40 km north of Fort McMurray. The ranch is a joint venture between Syncrude, the world's largest producer of light-sweet crude oil, and the Fort McKay First Nation. The ranch is 340 hectares and is one of Syncrude's reclamation projects, meant to restore the land to a level equal to pre-mining conditions.