William Marsden - Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta Is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada

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

PART I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

PART II

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

PART III

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

IN WHICH AN AMERICAN DISCOVERS HOW TO BLAST HIS WAY TO PARADISE

M ANLEY L. N ATLAND WAS SITTING ALONE IN THE SOUTHERN desert of Saudi Arabia when 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 natures 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 suns 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, Natlands 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: Albertas vast oil sands in the Athabasca basin. This was a place where you didnt even have to look for the oilyou 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 creativeand 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. Hiroshimas 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 bombs 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 Albertas 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 worlds largest honeycomb. Of course, there was always the danger that down the road the honeycomb would collapse and Alberta would cave in. One minute youre home on the range without a care in the world and the next youre dropping 600 metres into a radioactive cavity.

But Natland didnt 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: