Greased by New Technology, Canada's Oil Sands are Booming
About 60 kilometers north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, the pavement ends. From Edmonton, the 440-km highway to Fort McMurray is a busy artery filled with construction workers shuttling to work in the oil-sands developments at the beginning of the week and home again at the weekend. Trucks crowd the road, carrying supplies to the burgeoning operational base. Wide and high loads are common for transporting oversized pieces of equipment or process vessels for installation.
The attraction is oil. Alberta contains one of the world's largest deposits of oil sands—an ore consisting of sand bound with clay and water coated with bitumen, a sticky, heavy hydrocarbon sometimes called tar with the flow characteristics of blackstrap molasses. Oil companies have been tapping the deposits for years but recent advances in mining and extraction have lowered production costs to a level competitive with global oil prices. That has sparked a building boom. The provincial utilities board has already permitted or is reviewing some 34 large projects worth an estimated $28.6 billion.