I remember being in a pickup on a cold morning, taking a drive to see the syncrude tailings pond..the surface was fog covered, grey/black. A vision of hell.

The refinery at the syncrude site has in the order of six hundred (600) fires per year.

Beyond the tailing ponds at the syncrude and suncor sites (and there are several – check the darker blue ponds on your first few photos), there are other environmental concerns; a huge smoke stack that produces odors in Ft. McMurray, 45 km away. Occasionally the scubbers upstream of the stack would malfunction and they would need to be bypassed. An engineer sang it to me thus:

“I see a blue sky and I want to paint it black
So I open the valve on my diverter stack”

The tarsand deposits in the area are HUGE. Currently, I believe all operations are located north of Fort McMurray, in an area where the tarsand can be removed by open pit mining. However, there are other technologies under research to extract the bitumen from the sand in areas where open pit mining isn’t economical.

With the price of oil at record highs, there is a renewed interest in oil sand projects, with several underway – each classified as billion+ megaprojects.

P.S. check the date on your post – typo?

Great story, great site!!

I will link to many more of your stories on my site.

Were this oil extracted using wind electric powered heat pumps for heat and aeration, the increased profits would make the whole project efficient enough to completely clean it up as it goes on.

As is done with coalmining in Germany. But it is being sold to Chinese companies which removes the property rights offshore, preventing Canadian environmental policies from steering the project in this greener direction.

That oil reserve used this way would end oil wars, allowing it’s economic leverage to instigate free and fair, and greener international energy markets.