The Canadian "Black" Gold Rush
You've only got to stroll down Hardin Street to the main drag, then hang a left and walk a couple more short blocks, to see what Fort McMurray is about. It wouldn't be the whole story, but you would catch the drift.
You'd pass the Boomtown Casino, strip malls, and a club called Cowboys proudly advertising "naughty schoolgirl nights". Then the Royal Canadian Mounted Police station, the municipal offices, the Oil Sands Hotel and Diggers bar, with its advertisement for exotic dancers.
You would be passed by Humvees and countless pick-up trucks, each more souped up than the next, many covered in dried mud, many carrying further four-wheel-drives - in winter, snowmobiles; in summer, all-terrain vehicles on which to go chasing through the bush, which is visible from the main street. And if the wind is from the north-west, you can smell oil on the air: heavy, slightly sour, unmistakable. Around here, they call it the smell of money.
As the Middle East has become more unstable and as Iraq has boiled into chaos, other, unexpected places have flourished, and none more so than Fort McMurray. Five hours' drive north of Edmonton, in Alberta, it has always been a frontier town, and even before the first white explorers came fur-trapping, the Indians knew that this place sat on oil - they used it to waterproof their canoes.
The trouble has always been that it's not conventional crude, easily liberated from the earth, but tar sands (also known as oil sands) - a mixture of sand, water and heavy crude that is much more difficult and expensive to extract. It can cost about $C26 ($30) a barrel to extract - so when that was comparable to the price of oil, there was no point in trying; but now that oil is close to breaking the $US100-a-barrel barrier ($108), there definitely is.
For years there were only two outfits mining the Athabasca Oil Sands, which occupies 141,000 square kilometres; now there are seven, including Shell. In total, 1.2million barrels are extracted each day from these sands, a number projected to rise to 3.5million. Eventually, Shell alone intends to extract 500,000 barrels a day.
The companies intend to invest $C100billion in the area in the next 15 years. If oil prices stay as they are, or rise, they're playing for possible profits of tens of billions of dollars a year - much of which will come from America, gleeful at this sudden access to so much "safe" oil right next door.
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Perhaps Gordon (Lightfoot) will write some songs about this...