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June 2008 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: A river to ruin Feature: Brothers in biology Feature: Scar sands Feature: Simply Superior The Inside Story Editor's Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic

“HARD TO BELIEVE, HEY?” says Scott Kinnee, the helicopter pilot flying me over the Athabasca oil sands north of Fort McMurray, Alta. “You don’t really get a sense of the scale of things unless you come up top.” Up top being 500 metres above ground level, high enough to see 70 to 80 kilometres in any direction; that is, until the sky closes over as we near the dozens upon dozens of emissions towers and flare stacks of the Suncor, Syncrude and Albian Sands plants. The limpid winter sunshine we’d had at the airport hangar 30 kilometres to the south is gone, and the sun is now a dull white bulb wobbling unsteadily behind a motionless sooty haze. “Yeah,” says Kinnee, nodding as I remark upon the sun’s enervation. “These plants are so huge, they basically create their own weather system.”

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The beauty of the boreal forest that surrounds Fort McMurray and covers most of northern Alberta lies in its magnitude, but once you arrive at oil-sands central, what you see is a landscape erased, a terrain stretching in a radius of many hundreds of square kilometres that is not so much negatively impacted as forcibly stripped bare and excavated. Dominating this landscape are half a dozen giant extraction and refining plants with their stacks and smoke and fire, disorientingly wide and deep mines, and tailings ponds held in check by some of the world’s largest dams. As a panoramic vision, it’s all rather heartbreaking but, if one is forced to be honest, also awe-inspiring, such is the energy and the damage produced by human ambition.

Yet despite how important, and how environmentally divisive, the oil sands have become in today’s politically charged energy domain, the early and even fairly recent days of this resource were decidedly humble. In fact, although it’s been a century or so since people first began trying to exploit the resource, it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the Athabasca oil sands were launched on today’s bitumen mega-arc, bitumen being the thick, tarlike hydrocarbon extracted from the sands and refined into synthetic crude oil.

Predictions vary slightly, but production is expected to at least quadruple to four or five million barrels of refined oil a day by 2020. From the start of the major expansions that kicked off in 1996 to the conclusion of current planned construction in 2011, close to $100 billion will be spent by industry on the Alberta oil sands. All of this is staggering given that in the early 1990s, not a single dollar of new investment was planned for the region and that oil was selling for less than $20 a barrel. As this issue went to press, it was going for $119 a barrel.

But in the early 1990s, Eric Newell, the former CEO of Syncrude and now Chancellor of the University of Alberta, saw a different future for the oil sands. It was Newell who spearheaded the formation of the National Oil Sands Task Force in 1995, which issued a report that year calling for a new vision and scope in exploiting the sands. Newell and his task force made the case, in Edmonton, Ottawa and Washington, D.C., that it was a resource in which it was worth investing. “We pulled together a vision of what we thought was possible,” says Newell. “And that was to triple production in 25 years and invest $21 billion to $25 billion.” He stops and chuckles. “I’d stand up and say that, and a lot of people thought I was smoking something funny. We were a bit off ! It took only eight years to triple production, and the industry spent $30 billion. And now another $70 billion of investment is on the books, with production projected for 10 times what it was then. None of us saw that happening, that’s for sure.”