The Canadian oil sands host day at the beach Billions of
dollars, automation vendors, engineers, and technocrats pour
into the boom town that is Fort McMurray By Nicholas Sheble In
the beginning, the primordial ooze sat right on the surface of
the earth in pools of black, tar-like gunk. It was tar, and it
was gunk. It is bitumen. It was so easy to get at that the Cree
Indians spooned it off the ground, out of puddles, and coated
their wooden canoes with the tar, thus waterproofing their
rides. It is not quite that simple to harvest the bitumen in the
21st century and certainly not as easy to capture as the sweet
crude that explodes out of the ground in the Middle East.
Bitumen, however, can refine further to synthetic crude oil that
then into one of the many petrochemical products sweet crude
becomes, such as gasoline, diesel, and plastics. While the
process is more laborious and expensive than that which is
necessary for refining sweet crude, it is profitable at the
current per barrel price ($126). Squeezing