The tar sands in Canada are nothing new. Humankind has been aware of and used them for hundreds of years. The ability to convert this resource into oil at a reasonable economic (not environmental mind you) price is new. This week’s Five Friday Facts are a bit of a history lesson regarding the tar sands. They come from Andrew Nikiforuk’s Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, reviewed this past April.
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In 1778 Alexander Mackenzie described the Athabaskan tar sands as “‘bituminous fountains.’” About a century later, Canadian botanist called it “‘the ooze.’”
In 1882, federal surveyor Robert Bell referred to it as “‘an enormous quantity of asphalt and thickened petroleum.”
In the 1880s a federal report in Canada cited the “‘inexhaustible’ tar sands”, referring to them as the “‘most extensive petroleum field in America, if not the world’”
At the turn of the 20th century, Charles Mair “called the tar sands simply ‘the most interesting region in all the North.”
- In 1956, Manley Natland proposed a thought experiment that involved detonating a nine-kiloton nuclear bomb underground in the tar sands in order to heat up and essentially liquefy the tar sands to the point where it could be extracted via conventional methods.
