Review
“[Marsden brings] a fresh pair of discerning eyes to an unusual series of nation-changing events. . . . [H]e confidently reports how an entire province is destroying itself, and then asks why no one in Canada ‘seems to care.’ . . . The biggest stupidities that Marsden discovers could and probably should shock any Canadian. . . . Yet Marsden’s unsettling exposé of careless decision-making sheds more needed light on some very dark corners in Alberta (and Canada). He has walked into a provincial boom-town, populated largely by arrogant and greedy males (Hells Angels with suits), and not flinched. Good on you, partner.” —Andrew Nikiforuk, The Globe and Mail
“This is a powerfully eloquent polemic.” —Edmonton Journal (September 14)
“Marsden’s book is an engaging and entertaining read. . . . [A] worthwhile read and it will likely generate a fair bit of discussion about the industry.” —National Post
“[Marsden’s] book is a good primer on many of these urgent problems . . . Marsden has held the environmental mirror up to Albertans and it’s not a pretty sight—as many here have known for some time. . . . Marsden tells his story with a judicious mixture of personal stories and technical details of oil and gas extraction.” —Edmonton Journal
“For the . . . dozen or so Albertans who believe the energy industry and its friends in the Alberta government are neither all good nor all bad and who believe the same of ardent death-to-civilization environmentalists—[you] need to read this book. . . . [T]his book could not have come out at a more opportune time. Marsden takes the worries of ordinary citizens and voices them . . . he pulls together all the disparate concerns into a readable whole. . . . None of us can feel smug. The sensible use of non-renewable resources is all of our duty, regardless of our association with the energy business.” —Calgary Herald
“This is a powerfully eloquent polemic.” —Edmonton Journal (September 14)
“Marsden’s book is an engaging and entertaining read. . . . [A] worthwhile read and it will likely generate a fair bit of discussion about the industry.” —National Post
“[Marsden’s] book is a good primer on many of these urgent problems . . . Marsden has held the environmental mirror up to Albertans and it’s not a pretty sight—as many here have known for some time. . . . Marsden tells his story with a judicious mixture of personal stories and technical details of oil and gas extraction.” —Edmonton Journal
“For the . . . dozen or so Albertans who believe the energy industry and its friends in the Alberta government are neither all good nor all bad and who believe the same of ardent death-to-civilization environmentalists—[you] need to read this book. . . . [T]his book could not have come out at a more opportune time. Marsden takes the worries of ordinary citizens and voices them . . . he pulls together all the disparate concerns into a readable whole. . . . None of us can feel smug. The sensible use of non-renewable resources is all of our duty, regardless of our association with the energy business.” —Calgary Herald
Product Description
A bestselling investigative journalist takes a tour of the Alberta oil and gas industry, revealing how Canada’s richest province is squandering our chance for a sustainable future.
In its desperate search for oil and gas riches, Alberta is destroying itself. As the world teeters on the edge of catastrophic climate change, Alberta plunges ahead with uncontrolled development of its fossil fuels, levelling its northern Boreal forest to get at the oil sands, and carpet-bombing its southern half with tens of thousands of gas wells. In so doing, it is running out of water, destroying its range land, wiping out its forests and wildlife and spewing huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, adding to global warming at a rate that is unrivalled in Canada or almost anywhere else in the world. It’s digging, drilling and blasting its way to oblivion, becoming the ultimate symbol of Canada’s – and the world’s – pathological will to self-destruct.
Nowhere has the world seen such colossal environmental destruction as is being wreaked on Alberta. At one point the province even went so far as to consider a scientist’s idea of nuking its underbelly to get at the tar sands. Stupid to the Last Drop looks at the increasingly violent geopolitical forces that are gathering as the world’s gas and oil dwindle and the Age of Oil begins its inevitable slide towards oblivion. As Canadians deplete their energy reserves, selling them off to Americans at bargain-basement prices, no thought is given to conservation or the long-term needs of the nation.
In this powerful polemic, William Marsden journeys across the heart of a province seized by the destructive forces of greed, power and the energy business, and envisions a very bleak future.
In its desperate search for oil and gas riches, Alberta is destroying itself. As the world teeters on the edge of catastrophic climate change, Alberta plunges ahead with uncontrolled development of its fossil fuels, levelling its northern Boreal forest to get at the oil sands, and carpet-bombing its southern half with tens of thousands of gas wells. In so doing, it is running out of water, destroying its range land, wiping out its forests and wildlife and spewing huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, adding to global warming at a rate that is unrivalled in Canada or almost anywhere else in the world. It’s digging, drilling and blasting its way to oblivion, becoming the ultimate symbol of Canada’s – and the world’s – pathological will to self-destruct.
Nowhere has the world seen such colossal environmental destruction as is being wreaked on Alberta. At one point the province even went so far as to consider a scientist’s idea of nuking its underbelly to get at the tar sands. Stupid to the Last Drop looks at the increasingly violent geopolitical forces that are gathering as the world’s gas and oil dwindle and the Age of Oil begins its inevitable slide towards oblivion. As Canadians deplete their energy reserves, selling them off to Americans at bargain-basement prices, no thought is given to conservation or the long-term needs of the nation.
In this powerful polemic, William Marsden journeys across the heart of a province seized by the destructive forces of greed, power and the energy business, and envisions a very bleak future.
About the Author
William Marsden is co-author of the international bestsellers Angels of Death and The Road to Hell. He is an award-winning senior investigative reporter for the Gazette in Montreal.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
PROLOGUE
WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY
In which an American discovers how to blast his way to paradise
Manley L. Natland was sitting alone in the southern desert of Saudi Arabia when an extraordinary idea popped into his head.
It was the end of a long day, and Natland was watching the sun set. Wrapped in thought and a Bedouin turban, the American geologist contemplated the climax to nature’s magic hour. “It looked like a huge orange-red fireball sinking gradually into the earth,” Natland later wrote in his diary. His mind wandered, and the display of the sun’s explosion of light caused his thoughts to take a sinister and disturbing turn along the following lines: sun, heat, 15 million degrees Celsius, energy, thermonuclear weapons. And then the idea struck.
Why not nuke Alberta?
It was an odd, disjointed thought process. Yet there was an unmistakable logic to it. Natland at that moment was sitting on the biggest oil reserves on the planet. It was 1956 and the world was in fact swimming in oil. In Saudi Arabia alone, Natland’s employer, the Richfield Oil Company of California, had all the oil they could ever dream of. All you had to do was sink a pipe; nature would do the rest. Yet Natland had become obsessed with a scientific challenge central to a place more than seven thousand kilometres away, in a remote area of Canada few people had even heard of: Alberta’s vast oil sands in the Athabasca basin. This was a place where you didn’t even have to look for the oil–you just reached down and picked up a handful of dirt and it was right there, black and tarlike, clinging to the grains of sand. But it was a treasure chest for which nobody had the key. For half a century a small group of scientists had tried to find a method of extracting the oil at a cheap price. Now Natland joined in the hunt. His solution was by far the most creative–and the most radical.
Natland came down from the mountain and began to record his epiphany. He pulled his everpresent notebook out of his pocket and quickly set to work outlining the basics of his nuclear brainwave. He figured a 9-kiloton bomb, what he referred to as a “thermal device,” would do the trick. Hiroshima’s “Little Boy,” dropped on Japan only eleven years earlier, had a yield equivalent to 13 kilotons of TNT; “Fat Boy,” which was dropped on Nagasaki, yielded about 20 kilotons. So a 9-kiloton bomb, he thought, would be a good start. Bigger bombs could be employed later. Natland imagined bombs as big as 100 kilotons. The size would depend on the proximity of towns and cities, and the effects of the bomb’s resultant seismic shocks on human structures. But for now, 9 kilotons would be good enough.
Natland drew up a plan of action. Bombs would be inserted into boreholes 1,300 feet (396 metres) deep and about 100 feet (30 metres) into what geologists call the Beaverhill Lake Formation of silty limestone, which runs to depths of 600 metres beneath the Athabasca oil sands. The bombs’ massive shock energy as well as the extreme heat would crush and melt the limestone rock, creating a giant underground cavity about 230 feet (71 metres) in diameter, into which, he predicted, several million cubic feet of oil sands would collapse. Natland was confident that the intense thermal heat plus the highpressure shock waves would literally boil the oil out of the sands and greatly reduce its viscosity, allowing it to migrate into pools.
Natland figured that each cavern could hold about two million barrels of oil, which is almost equivalent to Alberta’s current daily production. With an estimated two trillion barrels deep underground and unreachable by known mining technologies, that would come to one million nuclear bombs blowing up the underbelly of Alberta, a horizontal cutout of which would ultimately resemble the world’s largest honeycomb. Of course, there was always the danger that down the road the honeycomb would collapse and Alberta would cave in. One minute you’re home on the range without a care in the world and the next you’re dropping 600 metres into a radioactive cavity.
But Natland didn’t want to think about that. In fact, the whole idea seemed so good to him that he quickly sketched out a rough pictogram of how it would work.
One possible glitch was the issue of radioactivity. Natland considered the problem but quickly dismissed it, predicting the radioactivity would be contained within the cavity, trapped inside the molten rock. Therefore, the oil itself would not be contaminated. Nor would the radioactivity escape into the atmosphere. Or so he thought. “The vitreous nature of the slag will reduce the possibility of introducing objectionable levels of radioactivity into the oil,” he later wrote. He went on to describe what he thought would happen after the bomb was triggered:
A few millionths of a second after detonation, temperatures rise exponentially to millions of degrees, vapourizing and melting the surrounding rock and the superheated gases at pressures of several million atmospheres radially expand to create a cavity. After a time ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes, the roof of the cavity formed by the ninekiloton explosion is expected to collapse from the weight of the overburden. When this occurs several million cubic feet of oil sand will fall into the cavity where the oil will be heated sufficiently to be recovered by conventional methods.
In other words, the underground explosion would produce temperatures and pressures several million times greater than we normally experience on earth, vapourizing, melting and crushing rock to create the cavity and release the precious oil. An oil recovery well would then be drilled and pumps would bring the crude to the surface. Just like a conventional well.
Natland had no illusions about his nuclear solution; there would be a lot of convincing to do, a lot of strategic planning ahead of him. But even Natland was to be surprised at how quickly the idea caught fire. In fact, among its biggest fans would be Albertans themselves. In those heady days of nuclear enthusiasms, it seemed everybody wanted to nuke Alberta.
Some might dismiss Natland’s atomic revelation as that of a mad scientist. Yet his oil sands solution became a serious enterprise undertaken by otherwise sane men. The project employed the expertise of hundreds of scientists, including geologists like Natland, physicists and chemists, plus engineers, politicians and businessmen in both Canada and the United States. For anybody studying its genesis, the idea soon acquires symbolic and metaphoric proportions.
Even in the 1950s, oilmen appreciated the size of the oil sands. They take up about onefifth of the province–148,000 square kilometres. That’s bigger than New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island put together. It’s the size of Florida.
To be prepared to blow up a geological structure of such magnitude simply to extract oil requires breathtaking single-mindedness. Some might even call it psychopathic. But the point is that, in a sort of manic determination to exploit its resources, Alberta showed that it was ready to sacrifice itself.
As is still the case today.
PART I
TECHNOLOGY AND MUTUAL DESTRUCTION
CHAPTER 1
HIGHWAY TO HEAVEN
In which we head north on a Thursday
despite warnings from Dr. O
and do battle with an oil sands dumper
Dr. John O’Connor, the coroner for Fort McMurray, had warned me:
“Never drive Highway 63 south or north on Thursday . . . Or south or north on Sunday or Monday.”
“Why’s that?”
“Shift changes at the oil sands. The traffic is crazy. Your heart is in your mouth.”
Then he told me about the last accident he investigated: it’s winter and dark. A logging truck swerves to avoid a pickup parked on the shoulder but with one wheel still on the road, its driver fast asleep. Logs fly off the flatbed, piercing the windshield of an oncoming van. Two workers dead, one screaming for an hour before his heart finally gave out.
It’s Thursday morning. I put the car in gear and head north out of Edmonton.
Some Albertans think Highway 63 is a conspiracy. They think the government has intentionally made this 400-kilometre asphalt track narrow and dangerous, with few gas stations or stopovers. It’s the only road north into Fort McMurray and the oil sands. The government wants to discourage Canadians from visiting the sands, the conspiracy theorists suggest. Out of sight, out of mind. What you don’t know won’t hurt you. Maybe the theorists are right. Or maybe it was just a total lack of planning, as Ralph Klein said, that turned the highway to heaven into a death trap.
Highway 63 is the feed line to Alberta’s golden goose. Along this conveyor belt streams an endless flow of heavy machinery weighing up to 145 tons [132 metric tons]. This includes drilling rigs, prefabricated steel sections of refineries, ore crushers, oil extractors and sulphur plants, as well as building materials, food and other essentials and nonessentials. They all move north with the grinding determination of a combustion-driven consumer society. Convoys of tankers, container trucks and flatbeds, which often take up both lanes with their towering, superwide loads, clog the thin twolane highway. An ode to perpetual motion.
Every Thursday it becomes a workers’ run. They speed south towards Edmonton when their twelve-hour, sixday shift ends and they’re free to head back for a week at home, spending their money in shopping malls. Too many little white roadside crosses with fresh or plastic flowers mark the spot where the unlucky few didn’t make it, where their boom-tim...
WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY
In which an American discovers how to blast his way to paradise
Manley L. Natland was sitting alone in the southern desert of Saudi Arabia when an extraordinary idea popped into his head.
It was the end of a long day, and Natland was watching the sun set. Wrapped in thought and a Bedouin turban, the American geologist contemplated the climax to nature’s magic hour. “It looked like a huge orange-red fireball sinking gradually into the earth,” Natland later wrote in his diary. His mind wandered, and the display of the sun’s explosion of light caused his thoughts to take a sinister and disturbing turn along the following lines: sun, heat, 15 million degrees Celsius, energy, thermonuclear weapons. And then the idea struck.
Why not nuke Alberta?
It was an odd, disjointed thought process. Yet there was an unmistakable logic to it. Natland at that moment was sitting on the biggest oil reserves on the planet. It was 1956 and the world was in fact swimming in oil. In Saudi Arabia alone, Natland’s employer, the Richfield Oil Company of California, had all the oil they could ever dream of. All you had to do was sink a pipe; nature would do the rest. Yet Natland had become obsessed with a scientific challenge central to a place more than seven thousand kilometres away, in a remote area of Canada few people had even heard of: Alberta’s vast oil sands in the Athabasca basin. This was a place where you didn’t even have to look for the oil–you just reached down and picked up a handful of dirt and it was right there, black and tarlike, clinging to the grains of sand. But it was a treasure chest for which nobody had the key. For half a century a small group of scientists had tried to find a method of extracting the oil at a cheap price. Now Natland joined in the hunt. His solution was by far the most creative–and the most radical.
Natland came down from the mountain and began to record his epiphany. He pulled his everpresent notebook out of his pocket and quickly set to work outlining the basics of his nuclear brainwave. He figured a 9-kiloton bomb, what he referred to as a “thermal device,” would do the trick. Hiroshima’s “Little Boy,” dropped on Japan only eleven years earlier, had a yield equivalent to 13 kilotons of TNT; “Fat Boy,” which was dropped on Nagasaki, yielded about 20 kilotons. So a 9-kiloton bomb, he thought, would be a good start. Bigger bombs could be employed later. Natland imagined bombs as big as 100 kilotons. The size would depend on the proximity of towns and cities, and the effects of the bomb’s resultant seismic shocks on human structures. But for now, 9 kilotons would be good enough.
Natland drew up a plan of action. Bombs would be inserted into boreholes 1,300 feet (396 metres) deep and about 100 feet (30 metres) into what geologists call the Beaverhill Lake Formation of silty limestone, which runs to depths of 600 metres beneath the Athabasca oil sands. The bombs’ massive shock energy as well as the extreme heat would crush and melt the limestone rock, creating a giant underground cavity about 230 feet (71 metres) in diameter, into which, he predicted, several million cubic feet of oil sands would collapse. Natland was confident that the intense thermal heat plus the highpressure shock waves would literally boil the oil out of the sands and greatly reduce its viscosity, allowing it to migrate into pools.
Natland figured that each cavern could hold about two million barrels of oil, which is almost equivalent to Alberta’s current daily production. With an estimated two trillion barrels deep underground and unreachable by known mining technologies, that would come to one million nuclear bombs blowing up the underbelly of Alberta, a horizontal cutout of which would ultimately resemble the world’s largest honeycomb. Of course, there was always the danger that down the road the honeycomb would collapse and Alberta would cave in. One minute you’re home on the range without a care in the world and the next you’re dropping 600 metres into a radioactive cavity.
But Natland didn’t want to think about that. In fact, the whole idea seemed so good to him that he quickly sketched out a rough pictogram of how it would work.
One possible glitch was the issue of radioactivity. Natland considered the problem but quickly dismissed it, predicting the radioactivity would be contained within the cavity, trapped inside the molten rock. Therefore, the oil itself would not be contaminated. Nor would the radioactivity escape into the atmosphere. Or so he thought. “The vitreous nature of the slag will reduce the possibility of introducing objectionable levels of radioactivity into the oil,” he later wrote. He went on to describe what he thought would happen after the bomb was triggered:
A few millionths of a second after detonation, temperatures rise exponentially to millions of degrees, vapourizing and melting the surrounding rock and the superheated gases at pressures of several million atmospheres radially expand to create a cavity. After a time ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes, the roof of the cavity formed by the ninekiloton explosion is expected to collapse from the weight of the overburden. When this occurs several million cubic feet of oil sand will fall into the cavity where the oil will be heated sufficiently to be recovered by conventional methods.
In other words, the underground explosion would produce temperatures and pressures several million times greater than we normally experience on earth, vapourizing, melting and crushing rock to create the cavity and release the precious oil. An oil recovery well would then be drilled and pumps would bring the crude to the surface. Just like a conventional well.
Natland had no illusions about his nuclear solution; there would be a lot of convincing to do, a lot of strategic planning ahead of him. But even Natland was to be surprised at how quickly the idea caught fire. In fact, among its biggest fans would be Albertans themselves. In those heady days of nuclear enthusiasms, it seemed everybody wanted to nuke Alberta.
Some might dismiss Natland’s atomic revelation as that of a mad scientist. Yet his oil sands solution became a serious enterprise undertaken by otherwise sane men. The project employed the expertise of hundreds of scientists, including geologists like Natland, physicists and chemists, plus engineers, politicians and businessmen in both Canada and the United States. For anybody studying its genesis, the idea soon acquires symbolic and metaphoric proportions.
Even in the 1950s, oilmen appreciated the size of the oil sands. They take up about onefifth of the province–148,000 square kilometres. That’s bigger than New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island put together. It’s the size of Florida.
To be prepared to blow up a geological structure of such magnitude simply to extract oil requires breathtaking single-mindedness. Some might even call it psychopathic. But the point is that, in a sort of manic determination to exploit its resources, Alberta showed that it was ready to sacrifice itself.
As is still the case today.
PART I
TECHNOLOGY AND MUTUAL DESTRUCTION
CHAPTER 1
HIGHWAY TO HEAVEN
In which we head north on a Thursday
despite warnings from Dr. O
and do battle with an oil sands dumper
Dr. John O’Connor, the coroner for Fort McMurray, had warned me:
“Never drive Highway 63 south or north on Thursday . . . Or south or north on Sunday or Monday.”
“Why’s that?”
“Shift changes at the oil sands. The traffic is crazy. Your heart is in your mouth.”
Then he told me about the last accident he investigated: it’s winter and dark. A logging truck swerves to avoid a pickup parked on the shoulder but with one wheel still on the road, its driver fast asleep. Logs fly off the flatbed, piercing the windshield of an oncoming van. Two workers dead, one screaming for an hour before his heart finally gave out.
It’s Thursday morning. I put the car in gear and head north out of Edmonton.
Some Albertans think Highway 63 is a conspiracy. They think the government has intentionally made this 400-kilometre asphalt track narrow and dangerous, with few gas stations or stopovers. It’s the only road north into Fort McMurray and the oil sands. The government wants to discourage Canadians from visiting the sands, the conspiracy theorists suggest. Out of sight, out of mind. What you don’t know won’t hurt you. Maybe the theorists are right. Or maybe it was just a total lack of planning, as Ralph Klein said, that turned the highway to heaven into a death trap.
Highway 63 is the feed line to Alberta’s golden goose. Along this conveyor belt streams an endless flow of heavy machinery weighing up to 145 tons [132 metric tons]. This includes drilling rigs, prefabricated steel sections of refineries, ore crushers, oil extractors and sulphur plants, as well as building materials, food and other essentials and nonessentials. They all move north with the grinding determination of a combustion-driven consumer society. Convoys of tankers, container trucks and flatbeds, which often take up both lanes with their towering, superwide loads, clog the thin twolane highway. An ode to perpetual motion.
Every Thursday it becomes a workers’ run. They speed south towards Edmonton when their twelve-hour, sixday shift ends and they’re free to head back for a week at home, spending their money in shopping malls. Too many little white roadside crosses with fresh or plastic flowers mark the spot where the unlucky few didn’t make it, where their boom-tim...
