Black Gold

With all my excitement about mountain biking I forgot to post pictures on our adventure to the oil sands that Charlie works at. None of us had gone yet, except Charlie of course, and it was a beautiful day on Sunday so we all loaded into the car and hit the road. The oil sands are about 50 km north of town, approximately 30 miles for all you non-metric folk. It was so interesting as we transitioned from green lush landscaping to a flat desert like sand storm (it was also windy that day) with processing plants in the background pillowing out smoke. I must say the pictures are not for the environmentalists out there. I myself was naive on how oil is taken from the sand. I couldn't believe it when I was told that there is more oil reserve up here than anywhere else in the world. Why then Fort McMurray has gas at $1.16 a litre is mind boggling to me?

Anyway, in laymen's terms:

1) First the top layer of soil is removed

2) Next the sand with oil is hauled out of the ground

3) Then boiling water is flushed over to remove the oil from the sand.

Obviously it's a little more complicated than that but not worth writing a novel about. The sand pit you see in the picture is the sand after it is processed for oil and then returned to the land. At a later time this area will be reclaimed with topsoil and trees. Some areas have already been reclaimed and made into buffalo reserves. So you see it's not all bad and many of the oil companies are making an effort to give back to the environment.

On the way up we also stopped by Syncrudes(oil company) machinery display. In the pictures posted the humongous machines you see are what was used not to long ago to extract the topsoil and sand. Since that time everything has been converted to truck and shovel. Hence Caterpillars important role up here in the oil sands!! There are currently 100 Caterpillar 797 Off Highway Trucks and in the next 1 1/2 years there are plans of purchasing 80 more up here. Charlie will be a busy man making sure all these trucks keep running smoothly!