The Pits by Simon Tudiver

**Third prize winner of The Atlantic Monthly 2008 Student Writing Contest for Non-Fiction**

The Pits ALBERTA’S OIL SANDS ARE EXPANDING, BUT WHICH DIRECTION ARE THEY HEADING?

By Simon Tudiver

he black scar across northern Alberta looks most shocking from the air. A giant mess of chaotic industry unfolds toward the horizon—here in black moguls of tarlike sand, there in gilded pyramids of sulfur. Trucks crisscross the open pits that stretch for miles in all directions. The trucks look small from the air, until a truck pulls up next to a bus and dwarfs it. Each truck hauls 400 tons of oily dirt toward complexes of buildings and pipes and smokestacks that look at once futuristic and archaic. The day I fly over in a small Cessna, the clouds are low and dark, and the plane stays beneath them. These clouds are extensions of the

white smokestack plumes, hovering ominously above the churned landscape. We fly over tailings ponds—giant lakes of grey and black toxic leftovers whose surfaces shimmer with an oily rainbow. The mines are huge, but from up here, at flight speed, the edges quickly become visible. I snap photos of the sun reflecting off the Athabasca River winding upstream back toward Fort McMurray. But as one mine trails off behind us, another one begins, and again we’re surrounded by tailings ponds, work camps, another endless mass of exposed tar. The pilot points to a massive plot of manicured green covered with

what looks like piles of twigs. Some are 100-foot tall aspen. He tells me the land has just been clearcut, the first stage of preparations for mining. He motions off further in the distance and says leases have been signed all the way to the Saskatchewan border, some 50 miles to the east. I look out toward the horizon and imagine this place in ten years—tar instead of trees, a giant parking lot of monster trucks and smokestacks. I start to feel nauseous. It could be the intense fumes, but I stopped breathing through my nose twenty minutes ago. The plane banks over another field of black, and my stomach churns.

he precipitous growth of the oil sands industry rests on a patch of unconventional geography. Alberta has the fortune—quite literally—of sitting atop reserves second only to the famed Saudi oil fields. The Athabasca oil sands cover an area larger than Florida and contain some 1.7 trillion barrels of bitumen—the molasses-like goo that can get heated and refined into oil. Not all of that resource is retrievable, but living next door to the globe’s greatest oil guzzler ensures that as much as possible will likely find its way to the surface. (A common but conservative estimate predicts recovering about a tenth of the total, or 173 billion barrels.) Canada already supplies more oil to the U.S. than any other country, and a growing portion of that comes from the oil sands. Governments and analysts predict that the sands’ current output of about a million barrels a day will more than double within ten years. Even if the price of oil doesn’t regain its lofty heights, the industry can still meet that growth: pulling oil from sand is profitable at market prices of just $20 or $30 per barrel. With so many economic and political forces sucking at the sands, you might expect the oil boom to bust within a couple of generations. But the resource is so vast, that even with rapid expansion, by the dawn of the next century the industry will barely have scratched the surface. What does this mean for the natural environment? Profligate energy use, massive water consumption, and toxic lakes already blight parts of northern Alberta. Greenhouse gas emissions from mining and processing oil sands grew by 40 percent in the last decade—faster than any other industry in Canada. Barrel for barrel, oil sands pro-

duce three times the emissions of conventional oil. The impacts aren’t just environmental: cities are exploding, stretching social and physical resources to the limit. And as the industry grows, many people expect more of the same, only bigger and faster. But the heavy oil patch might be getting lighter. Today a number of companies are experimenting with new technologies for sucking out oil, some much cheaper and cleaner than their predecessors. Instead of moving the earth for mining, the new methods work with geology to move the sands themselves— pumping steam deep underground or lighting the oil sands on fire. But can a few new tricks really change an entire industry? Will new technology save the world from dirty oil?

ort McMurray is at once an urban planner’s dream and nightmare. The population is growing faster than anywhere else in Canada—so fast that developers can’t build houses quickly enough, which means a lot of people live in trailer parks and campgrounds. Those lucky enough to find permanent shelter pay the highest prices in the country. (The average price of a single-family home is nearly half a million U.S. dollars, or about twice the national average.) This city of 50,000 people is bursting at the seams and may be heading for a population of a quarter million by mid-century. From the air, the potential for expansion appears endless: uninhabited forest surrounds the city, skirting the inevitable frontier of human development. But the forest is not free for chopping; it belongs to the provincial

government, and opening it up for development has been a slow and tightly controlled process. “In my head, we’re already at 250,000—we’re already a major city,” says Sheldon Germain, the deputy mayor of Fort McMurray. “I’m ten, fifteen, twenty-five years out. That’s what we’re working towards.” I meet Germain in a bar on the second floor of a sports complex, in the middle of a construction site. We’re on MacDonald Island, just north of downtown. The city is spending more than $200 million to turn this place into the largest sports center in Western Canada. It’s aimed at families, at providing an antidote to some of the social problems that have come along with rapid growth. Germain calls the new complex “a jewel in our quality of life puzzle.” He has a tuft of reddish curls that matches his beer and clamato juice. Germain is skinny and bearded and he looks tired. He’s clearly proud of the project and the vibrant future it suggests. But it also frustrates him. “You’re in an epicenter here,” he explains, “The problems with labor and fast growth—this is a microcosm of that larger issue. This facility has been plagued by getting enough labor, enough materials, enough supervision. We’re taxed. Our Alberta economy is so hot right now that you can’t get enough employees.” The lack of workers is obvious everywhere. Fast food restaurants advertise $14 an hour starting wages. People routinely idle their trucks in long lines to buy coffee and doughnuts. A boy no older than 12 serves me at McDonald’s one night. Before I fly up here, people in other parts of the province warn me

about the service workers in Fort McMurray. Make sure you’re patient with them, I’m told, because workers have been known to quit at the slightest irritability. There are just too many other options. Germain has felt the economic boom from the inside. He was elected to city council ten years ago at the age of 26—the youngest person ever to hold that office. Since then, the population nearly tripled, and the city’s budget grew by an order of magnitude. The value of Germain’s house quadrupled in less than ten years. “Maybe Fort McMurray will be the first place in the world that has a million dollar mobile home,” he says, “who knows?”

ermain and I sit at a long table beneath a flashing television.

Beside us, windows overlook an ice rink in disarray, pieces of wood stacked here and there. I look across the bar, through windows facing out over a golf course. The sky is dark, and rain streams down the other side of the glass. Golfers from a tournament take refuge at round tables. Near the end of our conversation, I ask Germain what he sees for the future of Fort McMurray. “We’re going to be an environmental leader,” he tells me, “We’re going to be the smallest city in North America to have an effective transit system and rail system. We’re not above researching anything—if it means grey-water systems, if it means off-grid communities, whatever it takes for us to be a leader and still create a product that is livable, walkable, so that people don’t

have to drive. Create an urban— almost an urban opposite to our industry players in the north.” I ask Germain how this is possible, how he plans to achieve it, but he just repeats the vision without a clear blueprint. It’s an ambitious idea that seems hopelessly naïve. The city center is a mess of rundown bars and storefronts, an uninviting strip choked with trucks and SUVs. And outside the center, the expansion sprawls in a giant arc to the west, suburb after suburb of crescents and boulevards. Shopping malls skirt the edges, a WalMart here, a Staples there. Germain’s vision of a thriving urban center for Fort McMurray seems about as likely as an environmentally sustainable mine. S

owntown Calgary, the big city behind Fort McMurray’s boom, hugs the south bank of the Bow River and gains height by the minute. Cranes assemble buildings and office towers in every direction—economic growth easily measured in steel beams and shiny windows. The city center reminds me of a nascent New York: wide, deserted avenues unroll between tall buildings as taxis and bicycle couriers compete for asphalt. Like every other place in the province, Calgary has exploded in recent years, as much in girth as in height, with suburbs spilling into farmland around the city. My Albertan friends describe this growth as a cancer and long for the compact Calgary of the past—but they are part of the province’s liberal minority, a few critical voices in a chorus of expansion, growth and oily money. If Fort McMurray is oil sands brawn, Calgary is oil sands brain. Investors shop for projects here, oil companies strategize in shiny towers, and researchers test faster and cheaper ways to pull wealth from sticky sand. At the center of this swirl of money and ideas, in one of this young city’s few historic buildings, sits a gatekeeper of sorts: Heather Douglas, President and CEO of the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, a staid yet fervent promoter of all things Calgary. When investors arrive from around the world, Douglas entertains them, checks their credentials and vets the thickness of their checkbooks. “Two and a half years ago, people had millions,” she tells me, “Then by early ’07, they had billions. I’ve seen five delegations this year with trillions.” Not all of that money

fuels the oil sands, or even makes it to Alberta. But Douglas wants to show me that this city plays a global game, courting big money and growing as fast as the biggest boomtowns in China and India. Calgary’s GDP climbs seven percent every year. Nearly half of Canada’s new jobs are in Alberta, a quarter of those in Calgary. All those openings have left the city short 100,000 workers. Douglas argues that the pace of growth fuels a kind of collective ambition, a citywide dynamism bent on tackling any problem. “Calgarians get up in the morning and say hmm, here’s a new idea, how are we going to do it?” Douglas says. “And they go into their staff, and everybody rolls up their sleeves and tries to make it work. And the difference between Calgary and Ottawa—you go into your staff in Ottawa and they say, ‘we don’t do that. You can’t make us do that. We’re unionized.’ It may be something that you know that they would love to do, but it’s a different attitude.” Douglas’s can-do Calgary bubbles with ideas and ambition. She has lived all over the world, she tells me, and the only other cities that have a similar attitude are Singapore and Dubai. Douglas likens Calgary to a teenager “high on testosterone”—fearless, arrogant, willing to try anything. There will be failures, but from all that experimentation some good ideas must flow. (Douglas herself is full of ideas. At one point, she says, “I’m looking at the future and saying, hmm. You have submarines powered by nukes. Why can’t you have planes powered by nukes?”) Compared with Calgary’s teenage vigor, Douglas describes the rest

of Canada as “a bit more like the maiden aunt”—weary of upsetting norms, afraid of new ideas. So while Ottawa and Toronto sit around knitting policy, Calgary stays out all night scheming and wreaking havoc. “Calgary has the possibility to be the energy renaissance capital of the 21st century,” Douglas proclaims. The city could use the spoils of the heavy oil boom to fund an opposite kind of energy revolution—one developing low carbon, low impact fuels and technologies, designed for a future less dependent on the internal combustion engine. Douglas’s vision is a lot like Sheldon Germain’s utopian image of Fort McMurray—an environmental city living off the profits of environmental destruction. What does it mean to fuel the future by ravaging the present?

f the million and a half barrels of oil flowing from the oil sands every day, about twothirds comes from mining. The three biggest operations, Suncor, Syncrude and Albian Sands, all use similar methods. Machines scoop the grainy tar from the ground and then mix it with huge amounts of hot water. To the top floats the loot: thick, black bitumen, which gets scraped off and heated further, or “cracked,” to transform it into crude oil. The full process is more complex, but those are the simple—even crude—basics. The fundamentals haven’t changed since the chemist Karl Clark mixed oil sand and water in a washing machine in the 1920s. There’s another side to the oil sands industry, full of new tricks and aspirations. It aims to replace

the gritty old pits with greener techniques—ones that can tap wealth from depths the pits cannot dream of reaching. More than 80 percent of the resource is too deep to mine—it’s what one developer calls “the big prize” of the industry. Since the early 1960s, people have been trying out different ways of loosening up the sands in place— or in situ, as these methods are known—and then pumping them to the surface. There are about 30 such projects spread across the province, with nearly 100 more in various stages of planning and construction. The most popular in situ techniques inject high-pressure steam into the ground to heat up the sluggish sands. This process uses a lot of energy, much of it in the form of natural gas. Extracting and upgrading one barrel of bitumen burns up 1,500 cubic feet of natural gas—as much energy as you get from about a third of a barrel of crude oil. Mining uses half that much, but squanders some of the savings by burning diesel in giant

trucks. In total, the 30 in situ projects use enough natural gas every day to heat more than 7,000 American homes for a whole year. Steaming out the bitumen also sucks up water—about half a barrel of water for every barrel of bitumen. Mining uses six times more, but critics worry about in situ because it often feeds on higher quality water. The big mines all straddle the Athabasca River, an obvious and plentiful source. But in situ sites fan out across northern Alberta, many in places far from lakes or rivers. Without surface water, these operations dig down and tap aquifers, pumping out fresh groundwater to boil into steam. This is valuable freshwater, and no one knows how much is out there or how fast it gets replenished. Drained or polluted aquifers could spell disaster for a vast and pristine resource. And as in situ grows, this water will drain—unless things change quickly.

few blocks from Douglas’s historic building, I ascend a glasscovered office tower to meet Chris Bloomer, the Vice President of Petrobank, an oil company with a new idea that may bring sweeping changes to the oil sands. Bloomer’s short wavy hair is slicked back from his forehead, and he wears a crisply pressed white shirt. He takes me to a bookcase in the corner of his office and plucks one of the twenty or so small glass bottles off the top shelf. Inside is thick oil sitting on clear water, the two products of Petrobank’s experimental wells from an oil sand deposit about a hundred miles south of Fort McMurray, in a spot called White Sands. Petrobank’s big idea is in situ technology that uses less water and a fraction of the energy compared with steaming. It’s called THAI, or Toe to Heel Air Injection. As the name suggests, steam is replaced with air, which is injected through pipes sunk into the oil sands. The

pressure of the air meeting the deposits ignites them, setting a rolling underground fire.

energy input costs, and with this technology, the promise is quite high,” he says.

“You’re generating the heat right down in the reservoir,” Bloomer says, “Steam will generate, say 230 degrees C in the reservoir, whereas combustion will generate temperatures of 800 to 900 degrees C, and when you generate those temperatures, you actually start to thermally crack the oil.”

Even environmentalists agree that THAI looks good—anything with a lighter footprint is probably worth trying. But THAI is still a fledgling technology. Petrobank is building more experimental wells, but full commercial production is many years away. And whatever its promise, the method can’t make an impact until it’s scaled up. For now, steam remains the in situ standard, reliably pumping out more than 330 thousand barrels of oil every day.

Bitumen is thick and gooey because it’s made of many complex carbonheavy molecules—as many as 2,000 in a long chain. (Compare that with natural gas, the simplest of the hydrocarbons, which is made of a single molecule.) The reservoirs get so hot that the molecules of the bitumen actually break apart, or crack, and help the oil sands flow. This is good for pumping, and it’s also good for profit. Cracking the bitumen increases quality, and doing it this way—in the ground, using the fire—costs a lot less than upgrading it later, as happens with steaming. But Bloomer says his impetus is not just economic—it’s also environmental. “We took a viewpoint that this was a much more sustainable technology,” he says, “We don’t burn natural gas in the process, we don’t use water—it actually produces high-quality water.” Bloomer picks up one of his vials of bitumen and shows me how clear the water inside looks. It’s clean enough to reuse, he says—for instance, other in situ projects could boil this wastewater to make steam. Petrobank’s operations are still relatively small, but Bloomer says companies nearby may be interested in buying water in the future. “People are looking for ways to reduce footprint, reduce the overall

oaxing oil sand to the surface is not just the province of fire, air and water. Entrepreneurs and fortune-seekers try all sorts of methods. Some use solvents instead of water; others experiment with giant underground heaters or electric currents. There is even talk of building Western Canada’s first nuclear reactor in Alberta to help power the industry. The popular refrain is that the technologies are getting cheaper and cleaner and more efficient. But these are early days in a still-evolving industry. Following the path of that evolution, I drive north from Fort McMurray—over the bridge, just past the suburbs, several kilometers before the major mining sites—and turn off the highway onto a gravel road snaking through the forest. I’m driving with a graduate student named Chris from British Columbia who is also here to learn about the oil sands. The road curves and ascends and then opens onto a plateau stripped of trees. In front of us, a fence encloses three large black cylinders, a couple of trailers

and a warehouse. We drive through the open fence and park the car. The cleared land stretches back a couple of acres from the buildings, and red and silver pipes and valves poke up from the ground at odd intervals. Giant pools of water flood the ground—remnants of heavy rainfall. A man I’ll call Phil greets us at the car. He wears blue coveralls, rubber boots and a hardhat. We follow him past the cylinders to the edge of the pooled water and watch as he wades out to adjust a piece of machinery sticking out of the ground. Chris and I look at the water and then at each other. This place uses electric currents to heat up the oil sands. I picture a giant hairdryer in a giant bathtub, and I step back a few feet. Phil assures us there’s no danger—or at least, that’s what he’s been told. He says he prefers not to touch the water inside the metal contraptions that house the electric cables. The basic idea in using electric currents is the same as for steam or fire: heating up oil sand makes the oil easier to extract. The big advantage of electricity is that it doesn’t build pressure underground. When you pump down steam or air, you need a thick layer of rock above the deposits to withstand the pressure. But a lot of deposits fall in a kind of middle zone—too deep for mining but too shallow for steam or fire. That’s where electricity comes in. An electric charge travels through the water molecules attached to particles of oil sand, heating them up as the charge moves. After simmering for a while, the warmed sludge is pumped out into big cisterns to settle. The bitumen rises to the top and gets skimmed off. Phil is surprisingly candid about

the growing pains of this startup operation. He tells us about the time he opened a valve and one of the other workers got sprayed with bitumen. He says the engineers who designed the system didn’t realize so much pressure would build up during the pumping phase. Phil also points to a few puddles of black goo in the water surrounding one of the metal pipes, which he says shouldn’t be there. He halfheartedly tells us he’ll clean it up properly once we’re gone. We ask Phil about the impacts on the immediate environment if this project was scaled up. He tells us that the pipes and electrodes need to be closely spaced to work properly. For a big operation, huge areas would have to be clearcut, and the pipes would snake across the land, periodically disappearing underground. People say in situ techniques are

less damaging because they don’t scar the landscape with open pits and tailings ponds. But Phil’s picture of a barren pipe-filled expanse suggests otherwise. And if you look at aerial photos of steam operations, you don’t see pristine wilderness. You see what could be alien crop circles cut side by side from the forest, a patchwork of mowed shapes covering huge swaths of land. “Imagine these in situ operations eventually covering over a fifth of the province of Alberta,” says Mary Griffiths, senior policy analyst at The Pembina Institute, the leading environmental critics of the oil sands industry. “That’s a huge area. The well pads themselves are not that large, but they cause fragmentation of the forest, which has huge impacts.” Fragmenting the forest threatens the plants and animals that live

there. Predators spot prey more easily, and plants that thrive on the forest floor die off. And just like clearcut lands elsewhere, treeless soils can erode and leach nutrients into waterways, making it tougher for vegetation to return. In situ sites may not tear and blacken the land like mining, but they still cause serious damage.

he future of the oil sands is in situ. With most of the deposits locked deep underground, only forces like steam and fire can ultimately pull out the bulk of the oil. But what will that future look like? The journal Oilsands Review counts 99 in situ projects in various stages of development, most of them set to come online within the next decade. As long as steam and natural gas remain dominant, the future will be one of fragmented forests and massive energy use. But at a certain point, the current path

will start to buckle. The industry itself predicts that by 2030, the oil sands could demand more than 60 percent of the natural gas produced in Alberta—a projection that warns less of tightened exports and higher gas prices than big changes to the industry. THAI and electric could be part of those changes, but no one knows exactly how production will grow. Perhaps the only safe bet is growth itself. In the meantime, mining is increasing just as quickly as in situ, with 27 new mines set to start pumping almost 2.5 million barrels per day within 15 years. And with mining, the future is right here in front of us, slowly submerging in lakes of toxic tailings.

he day after my stomach-churning flight over the oil fields, I return to the black pits on a bus tour, intent on taking a closer look. But this is the sanitized version run by Suncor, one of the main mining companies, emphasizing the awesome size of the machinery, the obvious ingenuity, the environmental cleanup. I’m on the front lines of public relations, getting greenwashed in the massive trenches. I take my seat among other visitors— mostly tourists, some international, some retired. We drive quickly past the industrial maze of pipes and smokestacks. The guide points to a rocky slope—the outer wall supporting a tailings pond. Once on site, we’re allowed off the bus only once, in a parking lot with a building obscuring any views of the operations. The tourists pull out their cameras and take turns posing in front of a giant tire emblazoned with the company’s logo. “Say Fort McMoney!” the photographer shouts.

“Fort McMoney!” everyone yells back.

e cross a tributary of the Athabasca River, and the tour guide tells us about the environmental buffer zones between the mines and the waterways. Regulations require at least a hundred yards of undisturbed space, she says, but in most places the companies have chosen to leave four hundred yards, or even a thousand. She points to a small stand of trees, a fragment of forest squeezed between the gravel road and the river. She tells us two herds of deer live nearby. “They’ve figured out there’s no hunting on the site, so they love it here,” she says. I hold myself back from asking which they love more—the tailings ponds or the tar pits. I look around the bus and see a few people nodding their heads with the guide.

t the end of the tour, the bus drives north along the Athabasca, further away from Fort McMurray. We pull off the highway into a parking lot in the shadow of several giant buffalo carved in stone. Paths crisscross the young woods, and a small gazebo stands at the edge of the lot. This is Gateway Hill, 250 acres of forest and soil, and beneath that, remnants of the oil sands. The site was used by Syncrude to store rock and dirt stripped off the land nearby before mining. Since the 1980s, Syncrude has been slowly restoring the site, and in March of this year, Gateway Hill became the first patch of land the government officially certified as reclaimed. Industry leaders like to cite it as evidence that restora-

tion is possible—indeed, that it’s already underway. Gateway Hill covers about one-fifth of one percent of the total land so far disturbed by mining. After the stone buffalo photo-op, our guide tells us we’ll go see a few live buffalo—visible proof, I gather, that this reclaimed hill now lures wildlife. The bus crosses the highway and pulls into another gravel parking lot looking out over another patch of restored land. We get off and stand around a couple of trees. A small field of grass slopes down to a short fence, and beyond it a small valley, a meadow, and then a patch of forest. I see a road winding up the next hill on the horizon, and past that a tall tower. The guide tells us the buffalo are usually right there—just beyond the fence. She runs across the grass and looks over the fence to see if the slope of the hill is hiding the animals from sight. I walk down slowly to look for myself, and see nothing but grass—no buffalo stamping their seal of approval. A sign proclaims “The Future: Lakefront Property,” alongside drawings of geese and ducks, and images of people sailing and fishing. It lays out Syncrude’s plan to fill this valley 40 meters deep with tailings, and to cap it off with five meters of fresh water, enough to “fully support a diverse and productive ecosystem of plants and animals.” I look over at the beginnings of this new ecosystem—eerily shiny water with blackened, tarlike edges spilling over into a ravine, a mess of industry and smokestacks framing the scene. I can hear cannons in the distance frightening waterfowl off still-toxic tailings. If this is the road to reclamation, it looks slick and sounds embattled. S