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.’”
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In 1882, federal surveyor Robert Bell referred to it as “‘an enormous quantity of asphalt and thickened petroleum.”
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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’”
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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.