Well, you might say everything is bigger in the Canadian province of Alberta, the site of the fastest-growing oil-extraction project on earth.
There, giant shovels scoop up 100 tons of oil-saturated sands in one pass and dump them into 33-foot-high trucks that carry 400 tons. Tens of thousands of workers swarm over billions of dollars' worth of construction projects.
It takes a lot of sand to recover the bitumen - approximately 2 tons of sand to yield a barrel of oil. At the mines near the Alberta boomtown of Fort McMurray, the big shovels and trucks move enough earth and oil sands every two days to fill Yankee Stadium.
With recoverable reserves of 179 billion barrels - all but 6 billion of them from oil sands - Canada ranks second only to Saudi Arabia in global oil reserves. The United States ranks 11th, after Nigeria. And the estimate for Canada is only of the oil economically recoverable with existing technology. With current technology but no economic restraints, estimates of recoverable reserves rise to 311 billion barrels.
If you count the oil held deeply underground and as yet impossible to extract, estimates of those reserves soar into the range of 2 trillion barrels. All this in a remote world of little but trees and water, closer to the Northwest Territories than it is to Calgary.
At Northstar Ford and Lincoln, a car dealership in Fort McMurray, manager Robin Bohl said the province "is the economic center of the world right now."
That's not just car salesman hyperbole. Spending on oil sands capital projects in the region surrounding Fort McMurray totaled
$14.3 billion in 2006 and
$17 billion last year. Greg Stringham, vice president of markets and fiscal policy for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, expects that figure to rise to a record $20 billion this year.
The Canwest News Service reported early in August that when operating expenses are combined with $125 billion in proposed new construction, total spending over the next five years in the oil-sands industry should amount to $215 billion.
"They're not going to slow down a bit," Billings petroleum geologist Bob Fisher said of the Canadians. "As long as we're a consuming nation, they're not going to lack a market."
Canada is already the seventh-largest producer of crude oil in the world and is the largest supplier of energy to the United States, providing 82 percent of this country's natural gas imports and 18 percent of its oil imports.The oil sands industry produces about 1.2 million barrels of oil a day, and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers has forecast an increase to
3.5 million barrels a day by 2020.
On Aug. 20, the Edmonton Journal reported that two of the richest men in the world, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, had toured an oil sands project a couple of days earlier. Few details of the visit were disclosed, but one source told the Journal that Gates and Buffett had possible investments in the oil sands in mind.
With so much money pouring into the industry, the effects are sure to be felt in Montana, which shares a border with Alberta, and in the United States generally. Refineries in Billings will increasingly be processing crude derived from the oil sands, and costly pipelines will snake through the state, taking crude oil to refineries here and elsewhere in the country.
There will doubtless be other economic benefits. One Billings steel-fabrication company, which is still gearing up and hopes to have as many as 400 workers, already has a contract with a major new oil sands company and plans to rely on the industry for much of its business.
Pat Kimmet, manager of the CHS Refinery in Laurel, said his refinery and many others will be processing more and more Canadian crude from the oil sands in coming years.
"Until we get an alternative to hydrocarbon-based fuel, that's the answer," he said.
Or, in the words of Janet Annesley, a spokeswoman for the oil sands division of Shell Canada, "We so far haven't discovered a pixie dust that will run your car. When we do, we'll be the first to develop it and sell it to you."
But if the industry is huge, say its critics, so is the environmental damage it has caused and will continue to cause.
Last February, Toronto-based Environmental Defence published an extensive report titled "Canada's Toxic Tar Sands: The Most Destructive Project on Earth." In an introduction to the report, the group's executive director said the oil sands industry was "the biggest capital project anywhere on Earth" and that Canada has become "the world's dirty energy superpower."
In July, the World Wildlife Fund, based in England, published its own report warning of the dangers of the continued development of oil sands.
Both groups raised concerns about carbon emissions, pointing out that oil sands extraction produces three times more carbon than the production of similar quantities of conventional oil. They also point to damage to the water systems of northern Canada and to the great boreal forest that covers a large part of Canada from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean.
In mid-August, Indian leaders met at the community of Fort Chipewyan and issued a joint declaration calling for a moratorium on oil sands projects until government and industry better understand the impacts of development and come up with ways to lessen them. Fort Chipewyan is located on the shores of Lake Athabasca and is fed by the Athabasca River, which runs through the heart of oil sands mining and processing activity.
You begin to grasp the immensity of the oil sands industry as you approach Fort McMurray, which is about 1,000 miles northeast of Billings and 270 miles northeast of Edmonton.
North of Edmonton you pass through farmland reminiscent of North Dakota, with lots of water, green fields and dense clusters of trees. About 100 miles south of Fort McMurray, the farmland peters out and one is surrounded by the vastness of the arboreal forest.
Everywhere except where it has been cleared by people, the forest is thick with vegetation - brush, grasses, scrawny jack pines and tall, skinny poplars and birch trees. You also start to see lots of wet ground, spongy muskeg that looks like prime moose habitat.
Then, suddenly, Fort McMurray pops out of the woods, a bustling city about the size of Billings. The streets are crowded with traffic and new construction is everywhere - mostly apartment complexes.
But even the ferment of Fort McMurray doesn't prepare you for all the activity north of town. An interstate-quality four-lane highway, leading to the oil sands mines and processing plants, is packed with cars, vans and buses hauling thousands of workers to and from the mines and plants.
There are innumerable pickup trucks bearing company logos, and an endless stream of semitrailers ferrying supplies, equipment and gigantic preassembled pieces of new processing plants. Here and there, in clearings bordering the highway, you see long rows of metal prefabricated housing units. These are the "project accommodations," more commonly known as work camps, that house an estimated 25,000 temporary workers - the welders, carpenters, ironworkers and other tradesmen who are building the infrastructure needed to process the oil sands.
Clusters of construction cranes dot the horizon. At one site there were at least 25 cranes, from small, truck-mounted models to towering, free-standing cranes. Once you reach the first working processing plant, owned by Syncrude Canada, the biggest player in the industry, huge, gray settling ponds stretch off into the distance on either side of the road.
There is also Syncrude's processing plant, a complex so large that construction of a new coker - designed solely to reduce the plant's sulfur dioxide emissions - will cost an estimated $770 million and involves the use of a 423-foot crane. Last year, the plant treated enough oil sands to produce 112 million barrels of refinery-ready crude oil.
Ten miles beyond the Syncrude plant is the Muskeg Mine, owned by Albian Sands, a consortium made up of the Shell, Marathon and Chevron oil companies.
The Muskeg Mine began operations in 2002 and has been operating around the clock, 365 days a year, ever since. As of this spring, the project had nearly 1,200 workers on staff and 1,300 independent contractors, representing 36 countries.
"You get to meet people from all over the world," said mine superintendent Bob Riggle, a native of Indiana who worked in the Wyoming coal fields for 22 years before moving to Canada.
After six years of production, the Muskeg Mine is nearly two miles long and a little more than half a mile wide. Syncrude has mined three pits over the years, all of them larger than the Muskeg is now. Suncor, the only other company that has mined the oil sands to date, has operated two pits, both larger than the Muskeg Mine.
Inside the Muskeg Mine pit, the air is thick with the rotten-egg smell of sulfur. On an afternoon in mid-August, with a van load of visiting journalists looking on, one of the giant shovels filled trucks with "waste rock," non-oil-bearing soils that eventually will be used for dikes on tailings ponds.
John Rhind, chief of operations at the mine, pointed at the man behind the wheel of the story-and-a-half-high dump truck.
"That guy can drive over a three-quarter-ton pickup and not even know he did it," he said.
In the mines, the overburden - the trees, soil and glacial till that sits atop the oil sands - is up to about 90 feet deep. Beneath that, the oil sands can reach a depth of about 250 feet and still be economical to extract.
If the oil is trapped in sands at depths greater than that, the oil is extracted by "in-situ" methods. That basically involves pumping steam underground so that it slowly heats the bitumen enough to make it flow. Perforated pipes even deeper underground catch the liquid bitumen and it is pumped to the surface, as in conventional oil drilling.
As big as the oil sands developments seem, industry officials - and environmentalists coming from a different perspective entirely - say developments yet to come will dwarf what is happening now.
"The sky's the limit on how much time there is in the oil-sands development," said Philip Cooper, manager of communications for the city of Fort McMurray. "The amount of this stuff is mind-boggling."
Ed Kemmick can be reached at (406) 657-1293 or at ekemmick@billingsgazette.com.
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)