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Text of the page (random words):
pulation that you can tell was invented to not describe something and you run the biggest trucks and shovels in the world actually the biggest 400 ton dump trucks that cost five million dollars each and tires that cost the price of a house and you mine it like coal the oil sand goes into crushers and then into giant hot water tumblers that separate the bitumen from the sand the way you d separate wet paint from gravel with a lot of help from caustic soda and even more help from steam the water goes into tailings ponds which are not ponds they are lakes they are visible from low earth orbit and they are full of a mixture of fine clays and residual bitumen and a lot of other chemistry that is at best dubious and at worst a slow motion environmental catastrophe nobody in alberta can figure out how to clean up and which by provincial law the operators are supposed to eventually reclaim a promise whose timeline keeps sliding to the right and whose financial reserves if you actually cost them out would bankrupt most of the companies that made them that s the mining side the other eighty percent of the reserves are too deep to mine for those you use sagd steam assisted gravity drainage which works like this you drill two horizontal wells one stacked a few meters above the other you blast the upper one full of high pressure steam until the bitumen down there gets hot enough to actually flow and then you collect the flowable bitumen out of the lower well you are essentially cooking the ground to do this you need ungodly amounts of natural gas because steam doesn t make itself and the natural gas is piped in from elsewhere in the province which is why the oil sands are sometimes described accurately as a process for converting natural gas which is a reasonably clean fuel into synthetic crude which is not at a thermodynamic efficiency that would make a nineteenth century millwright wince the net energy math on this is fine it works you put one unit of energy in you get three or four out that s the rough ratio less than conventional oil s old ten to one but more than enough to make money at any oil price north of roughly fifty dollars a barrel which the global oil price has been north of most of the time since about 2004 so it gets done and once you ve gotten the bitumen out of the ground whether by digging or by cooking you still can t ship it because at pipeline temperature it s still too thick to flow so you cut it with condensate a light hydrocarbon imported specifically for this purpose sometimes from the us gulf shipped north used as a thinner until it s a mix called dilbit diluted bitumen which is what actually goes down the pipe about a third of every barrel of dilbit leaving alberta is diluent you are paying to ship the thinner this is i want to stress the normal operation of the industry none of this is scandal this is the regular tuesday the scale of it is the part people don t absorb because the numbers are all in units nobody has intuitions for canadian oil sands production is running around 3 5 million barrels a day as of 2025 which is more than every opec producer except saudi arabia and iraq which is almost half of all oil produced in canada which accounts for most of the difference between canada being an oil exporting country and canada being a quiet resource backwater with a per capita income that looks more like ireland s the industry is about thirty percent of alberta s gdp it is the entire reason alberta s per capita gdp is what it is until the trans mountain pipeline expansion came online in may 2024 after twelve years of construction at a cost of 34 billion canadian dollars after the federal government had to buy the project from kinder morgan because no private company could eat the political risk basically all of it went to the united states which meant canadian producers had exactly one customer and priced accordingly at whatever discount to wti the american refiners felt like imposing this was annoying to canada in the way that having a single customer is always annoying to a supplier and it s the thing the pipeline was supposed to fix and fixing it is already looking like it wasn t as much of a fix as promised because production keeps growing faster than egress capacity can keep up okay that s the industrial situation here s the part that actually matters fort mcmurray is not a city in any sense that the word normally carries it is a town of maybe 75 000 permanent residents up near the 57th parallel surrounded by boreal forest and muskeg to which is attached and the word attached is wrong the word needs to be something more like grafted or hosting a second population of roughly 35 000 workers who live in what are called camps the camps are the actual operational engine of the industry a camp is a cluster of prefab dormitory buildings attached to a cafeteria and a gym and maybe a movie room plopped down in the bush near a mine or a sagd plant with capacity for anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand workers workers fly in from everywhere in canada newfoundland cape breton new brunswick whatever backwater the post industrial labor market has stranded them in on two week on two week off rotations work twelve hour shifts live in a room the size of a cell and fly home to spend two weeks with their families before coming back the term of art is shadow population the official census counts them separately and this arrangement is not incidental to how the industry works it is the industry you cannot run a facility the size of syncrude s mildred lake mine with a labor force of people who live in the nearest city and commute to work there is no nearest city the nearest city is eight hundred kilometers away you have to import the workforce and because you have to import the workforce you have to house them and because you have to house them cheaply you put them in camps and because the camps are miserable you pay the workers a lot of money and because you pay the workers a lot of money they put up with the camps and the whole system is stable as long as the oil price is high enough to subsidize the discomfort premium it is an entire industrial operation structured around the fact that nobody would voluntarily live where the bitumen is and so the industry has to buy the labor s tolerance of not living there over and over shift after shift for however many decades the deposit lasts which brings me to kate beaton beaton is from mabou cape breton which is one of those canadian places that the twentieth century was mostly unkind to cape breton had coal and cape breton had steel and cape breton had fishing and cape breton lost all three of these industries in the space of about forty years and what it has now is diminished the island s culture which is gaelic inflected and absurdly musical and which has produced a shocking amount of art per capita has as one of its load bearing assumptions the idea that you will probably have to leave to make a living and that this leaving will be sad but necessary and that everyone you know will do it too and that it s been going on since the highland clearances and will go on after you this is the cape breton structure of feeling it predates the oil sands by about two hundred years the oil sands are just the current destination so when beaton graduated from mount allison in 2005 with an arts degree and a pile of student loans she did what her cousins and the boys from her high school had already been doing for a decade which was get on a plane to alberta she went to the camps she worked tool cribs she worked supply offices she worked at syncrude s long lake and at shell s albian sands and at a couple of the smaller operators whose names i can t remember off the top of my head and she kept a notebook and eventually many years later after she d become internet famous for hark a vagrant which is a different story she turned the notebook into a graphic memoir called ducks published in 2022 by drawn quarterly which won pretty much every prize available to graphic novels and landed on obama s list that year and which is i think the single best book anyone has written about what the oil sands actually are which is a very specific kind of social machine the book is called ducks because in 2008 while beaton was there 1 600 migratory ducks landed on a syncrude tailings pond and died in it which became briefly a global news story and got syncrude fined three million dollars which is roughly the kind of money syncrude made every forty five minutes that year the ducks were the visible atrocity the book is about the invisible one the invisible one is that the ratio of men to women in the camps was depending on which camp and which shift somewhere between 30 to 1 and 50 to 1 beaton spent two years as one of the maybe two or three women at any given installation surrounded by several hundred men who were working twelve hour shifts living in single occupancy dorms a hundred meters from hers drinking heavily when off shift because there was nothing else to do doing cocaine at a rate that surprised even her isolated from their wives and girlfriends and mothers and daughters and this is the part the book builds very patiently and very devastatingly slowly losing the ability to behave like the people they used to be when they were still at home the book is not a condemnation of the men it is explicitly not that the book s most painful move is that it keeps humanizing them keeps showing how they re also trapped also miserable also being used up by the same machine even as they do the things they do to her which without getting into the specifics read the book include the full range of what several hundred isolated men will do to two women when the hr function is a phone number in calgary that nobody is going to call and the thing beaton sees the thing she sets up with complete economy and then lets the rest of the book bear out is that the machine is designed to produce exactly this it s not a bug the camp structure produces isolated men away from their social networks in exchange for money isolated men away from their social networks given enough money and enough boredom will do predictable things and those predictable things are accepted by the operators as part of the cost of doing business the way a mine accepts that a certain number of miners will get silicosis it s a function of the design nobody up the chain at suncor or syncrude or shell wants the women in the camps to be harassed it s just that preventing the harassment would require reorganizing the entire labor rotation structure of the industry which would raise the cost per barrel which would make the operation uncompetitive and so the harassment is priced in as an externality the women are told they have a bad attitude the men are told to knock it off the rotation continues the oil flows what makes ducks extraordinary and what makes it a book about the oil sands rather than a book about harassment though it is also that is that beaton also sees the men she sees the welders from cape breton she grew up around except here they re trapped in a way she recognizes because she s trapped in the same way a way her dad would recognize from his own generation going to boston or toronto a way her grandfather would recognize from the mines the maritime out migration has been happening long enough that it has a folk repertoire a whole tradition of songs about leaving and the men in the camps are inside that tradition whether they know it or not some of them are actively dying inside it there s a running count in the book not emphasized just there in the margin of young men who die on the highway between fort mcmurray and edmonton or who kill themselves in their dorms or who disappear the mortality of the rotation is ambient it s baked in nobody makes a particular fuss because making a particular fuss isn t what anyone there has the cultural equipment to do and the thing i keep coming back to reading that book is how precisely it maps onto earlier canadian industrial extractions cape breton exported its own men to its own mines in the 1890s and they died of black lung newfoundland exported its men to the banks and they died drowning the cod collapsed in 1992 and those men went to fort mac there is a temporal rhyme here that beaton doesn t belabor but that sits underneath the whole book this is what canadian industrial history is a series of extractive operations that consume the bodies and social networks of men from places the previous extractive operation already hollowed out the oil sands are just the current iteration when the oil sands go and they will go either because the world stops buying the product or because the bitumen that s economically recoverable runs out or because a carbon regime finally prices the externalities whatever comes next will be staffed by the grandsons of the men who died at fort mckay who were themselves the grandsons of the men who died at glace bay same as it ever was the industry knows all this by the way none of it is secret the oil companies have sociologists on retainer the turnover statistics are studied the mental health crisis in the camps is a line item it has a budget there are contractors whose entire business is running crisis response services for a workforce they know is coming apart the 2016 wildfire which evacuated 88 000 people from fort mcmurray in the largest wildfire evacuation in canadian history which burned down 2 400 homes which briefly shut down most of the industry revealed in passing that the regional municipality s shadow population was around 40 000 people at that moment people who lived here but didn t live here who were uncounted in most of the news coverage because they weren t from there they were from somewhere else and they all went back to their somewhere elses during the evacuation and some of them simply never came back the 2018 post fire census found the shadow population down fifteen percent the oil didn t care the oil kept flowing the rotations restarted and the indigenous piece which i ve been circling without saying directly is that all of this is happening on land that belongs by every reasonable reading of treaty and prior occupation to the athabasca chipewyan and the mikisew cree and the fort mckay first nation and the métis communities of the region who have been variously co opted partnered with sued into submission paid off or simply bulldozed over depending on the decade and the specific negotiation some of the bands have significant ownership stakes in the operations now which is a development the 1970s activist version of this story did not predict some are still in active litigation over water quality and cancer clusters downstream on the athabasca river both things are true the oil sands produce billionaires and elders dying of bile duct cancer and they produce them in the same watershed and if you want a tidy story about which is the real one you ll hav...