Overview

This book covers the written record of Alberta's oil sands - the world's second-largest petroleum resource - from 1715 to the present day. The focus is on men and women who contributed to the enormous scientific and technological advances that enabled the oil sands sector to become a petroleum giant. Equally, it reviews recent developments that make much of the sector at best marginally economic.According to renowned petroleum historian Earle Gray, the book is a powerful addition to the corpus of writing about Canada's petroleum industry. But it is more than history: it is an account of current challenges and visions of future possibilities. While he focuses on the vast oil deposits in the Alberta oil sands, he also sheds wide-ranging light on other aspects of the Canadian petroleum industry's history. The author has weaved his story from an impressive array of diverse sources, as well as intensive and extensive research, Gray continues in his foreword. The result is a must-read for anyone interested not only in the history of the Canada's oil business, but perhaps more importantly, Canada's economic history. The Petroleum History Society's Clint Tippett adds, in the Afterword, that there are still major hurdles ahead if we are to truly fulfil the promise of the oil sands. Extracting the bitumen and upgrading it are intensive both in terms of energy use and of greenhouse gas generation. Transportation and market access continue to be challenges. It remains to be seen whether the Canadian oil sands sector will be nimble enough to avoid becoming roadkill, or at least become significantly restricted, he says, in either a fundamental economic sense or through the global controversy concerning greenhouse gases and global warming. Calgary-based economist Peter Findley, whom he cites, a different perspective. Although oil sands production growth has been impressive and robust since 1999, he said, it seems that the more production barrels that come online from the massive heavy oil basin, the more headwinds arise that operators must overcome to deliver a return to increasingly impatient investors. Operators had little to show from their investments, he said, even before the oil price rout. In this bust a lacklustre job market elsewhere in Canada (except B.C.) contributed to Alberta's pain, added Todd Hirsch, another of several economists cited. In effect, individuals in the workforce voted with their feet...by going elsewhere. The nasty recessions of the 1980s saw tens of thousands of people pack up and leave Alberta, resulting in a drop in the size of the work force, he said. During the darkest days of 1987, the province saw more than 1.2 per cent of its workers leave or drop out of the labour market. This repeated itself during the recessions of 1992 and 2009-10. One reason was that those earlier busts coincided with stronger economies elsewhere in Canada attracting the province's unemployed, the author says. Alberta's pain this time around got no such assistance - indeed, new international immigration made matters worse. Unemployment reached 8.6 per cent, the highest since 1994. Gradually, though, things got better. After touching US$26 per barrel in February 2016, West Texas oil prices doubled within a year. At this writing, the worst of the bust seems behind us.

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9781546452300

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A Calgary-based author, editor and writer, Peter McKenzie-Brown has written many articles for energy-related magazines and was coordinator and an interviewer for the Petroleum History Society's Oil Sands Oral History Project, which recorded and transcribed interviews with 117 oil sands pioneers. British by birth, he is American by upbringing and Canadian by choice. He began his writing career with the Reuters news agency in London, UK, in 1971. In Calgary he worked for Gulf Oil Canada, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, and Amoco Canada. He began publishing books and writing energy-related articles in the 1990s. His other books include Footprints: The Evolution of Land Conservation and Reclamation in Alberta (2016, with Robert Bott and Graham Chandler); Barbecues, Booms and Blogs: Fifty Years of Public Relations in Calgary (2008; co-editor and contributor); In Balance: An Account of Alberta's CA Profession (2000, with Stacy Phillips); The Richness of Discovery: Amoco's First Fifty Years in Canada (1998); and The Great Oil Age: The Petroleum Industry in Canada (1993, with Gordon Jaremko and David Finch.) In 2006, he contributed a five-part series on the history of Canada's petroleum industry to Wikipedia. Prior to serving as a coordinator and interviewer for the Petroleum History Society's Oil Sands Oral History Project, he was a recipient of that society's Lifetime Achievement award. In 2011 he was a recipient of the society's Article of the Year award for a series on the oil sands, and in 2017 the society bestowed its Book of the Year award to Footprints: The Evolution of Land Conservation and Reclamation in Alberta.

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