Last week as I trained engineers from Suncor Energy in Fort McMurray, I learned a few things about how they mine for oil up there. It is quite a fascinating process!

First, some information about the oil sands:

• The oil is just laying around naturally in the area, packed into the sand. The Athabasca river actually cuts channels into the oil sands, and the banks of the Athabasca are rich in oil. In the summer, say the folks who live there, you can actually see the banks of the river oozing oil as the sun heats the sand and the water, making a clayish glob of oozing tar that flows down to the river.
• This has been the case for many thousands of years, and various species of wildlife in the area have adapted to life with the tar sands. I heard from the folks there of a beetle called the Tar Sands Beetle, and also of a certain kind of toad that lives in the river and depends on the tar to protect itself from predators.
• The Native Americans… err… would they be Native Canadians? Errr… Oh, right, Wikipedia to the rescue: The First Nations peoples of the area knew about the tar in the river, and they used the tar to waterproof their canoes.

Now, the sand looks something like this:

And how do they get the oil out of this sand? Simply add hot water and stir… within a matter of minutes, the sand separates from the oil and sinks, while the oil floats to the top:

The oil skims off the top and forms an asphalt-like pitch substance called “bitumen,” and it looks something like this:

This black stuff then gets heated and “upgraded,” which, as I understood it, is basically a process of refining the oil into various grades. They get naphtha, kerosene, low-sulfur diesel, sweet crude, sour crude, and eventually bitumen. The bitumen is the main product, and any lower-grade stuff than that eventually becomes a form of coal called coke.

So, how do the oil companies do this stuff on an industrial scale? Well, many methods, but the one that I saw was surface mining: Next to the river this sand is closest to the surface, but as you go further away from the river the oil sands are deeper below the surface. Within a few miles of the river, then, are several land tracts that are leased to oil companies by the Canadian government. On these land tracts, the oil companies mine for the sand by digging a few dozen feet below the surface and uncovering large pits to get at the sand. They dig out the sand using large shovels or draglines:

These machines then empty the sand onto the world’s largest trucks, which carry them to a plant that dumps the ore into a pipeline for transport to the extraction process. The trucks are HUGE. At the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, they had one of them on display and here I am in comparison:

The pipelines carry the ore in a slurry form to the extraction building, which is where the ore gets mixed with hot water and steam to begin the extraction process.

There is a great article with more information on the process at Wired magazine, click here for the article.

Environmentally there are a lot of issues - the sand that comes out of the extraction process is fine-grade sand that is free of the oil that was in it, and they dump the sand back into a pond called the “tailings pond.” Eventually the company closes off the pond and plants trees on the sand, which reclaims the land back from being a large surface pit mine. The folks at the company describe this as a rational way of restoring the land to healthy use, but environmentalists see it differently because the surface mining destroys the forest that existed before they mined, and just planting different kinds of trees there will not reclaim the original forest.

It is indeed quite a strange sight to see these large plants in operation - they often have what the engineers jokingly refer to as their own “microclimate” because of the large steam clouds that continually hover over the site. You can see such clouds in this picture here of the Syncrude site:

At night the sight is even more striking:

All in all, quite a depressing sight really.

On the other hand, it is undeniable just how major this industry is to the economy of the region. It is a boomtown, and people come from all over the country to work here, even from overseas. I did not encounter a single “native” of Fort McMurray, primarily because, I guess, the town was founded only in the past 100 years expressly for the mines. I was also surprised by just how many women I saw working as part of the oil industry - from truck drivers to operators to engineers! Of the 10 engineers in my class, six were women! That is the highest proportion of women I have seen in my technical classes since a 50% mix in a class I taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder for a meteorology group. Clearly the industry is not as male-dominated as I would have expected from my preconceived notion of the oil fields.

However, the population is very transient, with oil workers hired and fired based on how the companies are doing financially. Housing prices are sky high, and many of the folks I talked with invest in rental properties because they can always find workers looking for temporary housing.

I still think the place would be more tranquil without the high level of temporary human activity in the area. There has got to be a better way to produce energy!!