Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta Is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (and Doesn't Seem to Care)

226 Pages·2008·1.56 MB·English

by  William Marsden

Praise for Stupid to the Last Drop
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BUSINESS BOOK AWARD
“For the … dozen or so Albertans who believe the energy industry and its friends in
the Alberta government are neither all good nor all bad and who believe the same
of ardent death-to-civilization environmentalists—you need to read this book. It
could not have come out at a more opportune time. Marsden takes the worries of
ordinary citizens and voices them. He pulls together all the disparate concerns into
a readable whole … None of us can feel smug. The sensible use of non-renewable
resources is all our duty, regardless of our association with the energy business.”
—Calgary Herald
“Marsden tells his story with a judicious mixture of personal stories and technical
details of oil and gas extraction.”
—Edmonton Journal
“Marsden brings a fresh pair of discerning eyes to an unusual series of nation-
changing events. He confidently reports how an entire province is destroying itself,
and then asks why no one in Canada ‘seems to care.’ … The biggest stupidities that
Marsden discovers could and probably should shock any Canadian …. He has
walked into a provincial boom-town, populated largely by arrogant and greedy
males (Hells Angels with suits), and not flinched. Good on you, partner.”
—The Globe and Mail
“An engaging and entertaining read … Marsden mingles amusing anecdotes with
some hefty science. A worthwhile read [that] will likely generate a fair bit of
discussion about the industry.”
—National Post
“This is a gripping and horrifying account of how the province of Alberta and the
U.S. are ripping up tens of thousands of square kilometres of vital natural habitat to
extract bitumen from the ‘oil sands’ in one of the most murderously polluting
processes available to human beings.”
—New Statesman
Also by William Marsden
Angels of Death: Inside the Bikers’ Empire of Crime (with Julian Sher)
The Road to Hell: How the Biker Gangs Are Conquering Canada (with Julian Sher)

To Janet, Caroline and Katharine
We are reasonable people all, and we have nice conversations, very profound
conversations, but nothing happens. And I think that nothing happens because the
overwhelming majority of us did not enjoy that preadolescent identification with
nature … It is simply academic talk … What enables natural communities, I mean
multi-species communities, to function is the fact that they have a shared awareness
of themselves as a community, which we have not lost because it lives in us. But we
have deliberately shelved it and filed it away in the interest of the human
enterprise of the consumption of what we call resources and what I call nature.
—John Livingston, naturalist
CONTENTS
Prologue We Have the Technology

PART I TECHNOLOGY AND MUTUAL DESTRUCTION
Chapter 1 Highway to Heaven
Chapter 2 Manley Natland’s Fantasy
Chapter 3 Early Signs of Madness
Chapter 4 Breaking Alberta’s Atom

PART II THE POLITICS AND BUSINESS OF OIL
Chapter 5 Washington’s Doomsday Politics
Chapter 6 Roll Call
Chapter 7 Getting the Jump on the Energy Game
Chapter 8 The Mauling of Big Bear

PART III ALIEN INVASION
Chapter 9 Life on Mars
Chapter 10 Hello! Is Anybody Out There?
Chapter 11 Heaven on the Moon
Chapter 12 Down North
Chapter 13 The Last Cowboys and Cowgirls
Epilogue To the Last Drop
Afterword
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY
IN WHICH AN AMERICAN DISCOVERS HOW TO BLAST HIS WAY TO
PARADISE
M L. N desert of Saudi Arabia when
ANLEY ATLAND WAS SITTING ALONE IN THE SOUTHERN
an extraordinary idea popped into his head.
It was the end of a long day, and Natland was watching the sun set.
Wrapped in thought and a Bedouin turban, the American geologist
contemplated the climax to nature’s magic hour. “It looked like a huge
orange-red fireball sinking gradually into the earth,” Natland later wrote
in his diary. His mind wandered, and the display of the sun’s explosion
of light caused his thoughts to take a sinister and disturbing turn along
the following lines: sun, heat, 15 million degrees Celsius, energy,
thermonuclear weapons. And then the idea struck.
Why not nuke Alberta?
It was an odd, disjointed thought process. Yet there was an
unmistakable logic to it. Natland at that moment was sitting on the
biggest oil reserves on the planet. It was 1956 and the world was in fact
swimming in oil. In Saudi Arabia alone, Natland’s employer, the
Richfield Oil Company of California, had all the oil they could ever
dream of. All you had to do was sink a pipe; nature would do the rest.
Yet Natland had become obsessed with a scientific challenge central to a
place more than seven thousand kilometres away, in a remote area of
Canada few people had even heard of: Alberta’s vast oil sands in the
Athabasca basin. This was a place where you didn’t even have to look
for the oil—you just reached down and picked up a handful of dirt and it
was right there, black and tar-like, clinging to the grains of sand. But it
was a treasure chest for which nobody had the key. For half a century a
small group of scientists had tried to find a method of extracting the oil
at a cheap price. Now Natland joined in the hunt. His solution was by far
the most creative—and the most radical.
Natland came down from the mountain and began to record his
epiphany. He pulled his ever-present notebook out of his pocket and
quickly set to work outlining the basics of his nuclear brainwave. He
figured a 9-kiloton bomb, what he referred to as a “thermal device,”
would do the trick. Hiroshima’s “Little Boy,” dropped on Japan only
eleven years earlier, had a yield equivalent to 13 kilotons of TNT; “Fat
Boy,” which was dropped on Nagasaki, yielded about 20 kilotons. So a
9-kiloton bomb, he thought, would be a good start. Bigger bombs could
be employed later. Natland imagined bombs as big as 100 kilotons. The
size would depend on the proximity of towns and cities, and the effects
of the bomb’s resultant seismic shocks on human structures. But for now,
9 kilotons would be good enough.
Natland drew up a plan of action. Bombs would be inserted into
boreholes 1,300 feet (396 metres) deep and about 100 feet (30 metres)
into what geologists call the Beaverhill Lake Formation of silty
limestone, which runs to depths of 600 metres beneath the Athabasca oil
sands. The bombs’ massive shock energy as well as the extreme heat
would crush and melt the limestone rock, creating a giant underground
cavity about 230 feet (71 metres) in diameter, into which, he predicted,
several million cubic feet of oil sands would collapse. Natland was
confident that the intense thermal heat plus the high-pressure shock
waves would literally boil the oil out of the sands and greatly reduce its
viscosity, allowing it to migrate into pools.
Natland figured that each cavern could hold about two million barrels
of oil, which is almost equivalent to Alberta’s current daily production.
With an estimated two trillion barrels deep underground and
unreachable by known mining technologies, that would come to one
million nuclear bombs blowing up the underbelly of Alberta, a
horizontal cutout of which would ultimately resemble the world’s largest
honeycomb. Of course, there was always the danger that down the road
the honeycomb would collapse and Alberta would cave in. One minute
you’re home on the range without a care in the world and the next
you’re dropping 600 metres into a radioactive cavity.
But Natland didn’t want to think about that. In fact, the whole idea
seemed so good to him that he quickly sketched out a rough pictogram
of how it would work.
One possible glitch was the issue of radioactivity. Natland considered
the problem but quickly dismissed it, predicting the radioactivity would
be contained within the cavity, trapped inside the molten rock.
Therefore, the oil itself would not be contaminated. Nor would the
radioactivity escape into the atmosphere. Or so he thought. “The
vitreous nature of the slag will reduce the possibility of introducing
objectionable levels of radioactivity into the oil,” he later wrote. He
went on to describe what he thought would happen after the bomb was
triggered:
A few millionths of a second after detonation, temperatures
rise exponentially to millions of degrees, vapourizing and
melting the surrounding rock and the superheated gases at
pressures of several million atmospheres radially expand to
create a cavity. After a time ranging from a few seconds to a
few minutes, the roof of the cavity formed by the nine-kiloton
explosion is expected to collapse from the weight of the
overburden. When this occurs several million cubic feet of oil
sand will fall into the cavity where the oil will be heated
sufficiently to be recovered by conventional methods.
In other words, the underground explosion would produce temperatures
and pressures several million times greater than we normally experience
on earth, vapourizing, melting and crushing rock to create the cavity and
release the precious oil. An oil recovery well would then be drilled and
pumps would bring the crude to the surface. Just like a conventional
well.
Natland had no illusions about his nuclear solution; there would be a
lot of convincing to do, a lot of strategic planning ahead of him. But
even Natland was to be surprised at how quickly the idea caught fire. In
fact, among its biggest fans would be Albertans themselves. In those
heady days of nuclear enthusiasms, it seemed everybody wanted to nuke
Alberta.
Some might dismiss Natland’s atomic revelation as that of a mad
scientist. Yet his oil sands solution became a serious enterprise