Photostory #418: In Alberta, Canada: World's Biggest Oil Source Soon to be Tapped

Photographers
Ted Grant
Maker
National Film Board of Canada
Release Date
June 7, 1966
Collection
CMCP fonds
Credit Line
Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography fonds, National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives
Main Text
Modern technology coupled with the economic demands of a busy world are turning the magic key to open yet another of the world's most fabulous treasure-houses - this time the vast oil reserves of the Athabasca tar sands. Just a score of miles from the small (but now mushrooming) town of Fort McMurray in northern Alberta is rising the physical result of years of varying conjecture by oil men across North America. The Great Canadian Oil Sands Limited project for extracting the 650,000,000 barrels of rich oil contained in their 4,000-acre lease is basically a massive plant where 100,000 tons of oil-soaked sand per day will be cooked in a huge drum to separate the bitumen that finally yields the valuable high-quality, crude oil. Important by-products, of coke (which will be used to provide the heat required by the recovery process) and elemental sulphur, will also be extracted from the bitumen. Of the 30,000-square-mile region known as the Athabasca tar sands, nearly half overlays an area containing estimated recoverable reserves of oil totalling more than 300,000,000,000 barrels - as much as all other liquid petroleum reserves in the non-communist world put together. Success in extracting this vast wealth in energy, only 250 miles north of modern Edmonton, added to existing conventional oil production, might well mean that the future dictates of economics will help make the bustling province of Alberta the oil centre of North America in just a few years, proving Canada's richness in natural resources to a most remarkable degree.