Conflicting Interests: Development Politics and the Environmental Regulation of the Alberta Oil Sands Industry, 1970–1980

Abstract

Hereward Longley Alberta's hydrocarbon deposits have been a mainstay of provincial economic development since the Second World War. When Imperial Oil struck oil near Leduc, Alberta in February 1947, it marked the beginning of a petroleum boom that rapidly transformed Alberta's impoverished agricultural economy and drew thousands of people to the province. 1 As demand for oil grew, the oil industry and the Alberta government began producing synthetic oil from the vast bitumen deposits in the Athabasca region. The Alberta bitumen deposits are fine-grained sands, which hold up to eighteen per cent bitumen, a heavy and viscous hydrocarbon mixture. The largest of these, the Athabasca deposit, covers 50,000 square kilometers of northeastern Alberta (Figure 1). The Athabasca deposit occurs in the McMurray formation, a stratigraphic unit of the Early Cretaceous Mannville Group of the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin. 2 The Athabasca bitumen deposits dwarf Alberta's conventional oil deposits, but difficulties with mining and upgrading bitumen into synthetic crude oil prevented the commercial production of bitumen before the 1960s. 3 In 1958 Sun Oil entered an agreement with Great Canadian Oil Sands Limited (GCOS) to finance a bitumen extraction plant. The Alberta government approved GCOS in 1962, construction started in 1964, and the 45,000 barrels per day (bpd) plant opened in 1967. 4 In 1966, as construction progressed on GCOS, Cities Service, Imperial Oil, Royalite, and Atlantic Richfield Canada formed the Syncrude consortium and began planning a second plant. Responding to pressure from industry, and from modernist aspirations, governments in the 20 th century ultimately prioritized resource extraction, technological development, and economic growth above associated costs and consequences. 5

Excavation du docudrame de CBC The Tar Sands

“…1 Yet the show's 1977 broadcast and Lougheed's ensuing lawsuit and public controversy stands as a critical, though mostly forgotten, moment in the mediated history of Canada's bitumen sands. 2 Indeed, it is only recently that scholars such as Longley (2021) have begun critiquing Lougheed's legacy and-much like Pratt (1976)-questioning the corner Lougheed and his government backed themselves into. Excavating The Tar Sands affords a unique opportunity to further expose fossil fuel's long-standing dominant position in the Canadian political and social imagination.…”

Community multiscale air quality (CMAQ) modeling of the atmospheric quality and pollutant deposition over the Terrace-Kitimat Valley of northwestern British Columbia, Canada

“…Industrial air waste permitting by regulatory agencies often prioritize environment protection goals ahead of profit-making by businesses (Dietz 2003, Longley 2019. This is because many production processes are emission-intensive and their environmental impact may linger, long after operations have ceased.…”