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As retired Syncrude Canada president Jim Carter says, the oil sands are no place for quitters

Fashionable opinion has always been as rough on project builders as natural and technical obstacles in the 140,200-square-kilometer bitumen belt.

In the oil sands pioneer era, other industry branches were as critical as hard-line environmentalists are today. One trailblazer – the late Joe Fitzgerald, who figured in the Great Canadian Oil Sands project that inaugurated Fort McMurray production in 1967 – recorded a vivid sample of the early low esteem.

“I was lunching, as a guest, in the Calgary Petroleum Club,” Fitzgerald wrote in a 1978 eyewitness oil sands history book, Black Gold with Grit. His host left for a moment and “a man joined me, asking if I was indeed ‘one of those guys from the tar sands,’” Fitzgerald recalled.

“Assuming he was curious to learn more about our work, I assured him that I indeed was one of them. With that, he demanded proof of my membership in the Petroleum Club or one of its affiliates.”
When Fitzgerald admitted he was just visiting, the insider called the authorities over to the table. “Now the manager was demanding some evidence that I was better than a ‘tar sands miner.’ Had my host not arrived at the right moment, I am sure I would have been promptly thrown out of the Petroleum Club.”

The insider made sure Fitzgerald got the message. “Very well for today, he said, but at the next meeting of the club he was definitely going to move a resolution to see that I, ‘and none of your kind,’ would ever enjoy privileges in the Calgary Petroleum Club.”

That was in 1962. GCOS and Syncrude were fighting for provincial permission to do five per cent of Alberta oil production. Conventional wells overflowed with more than local markets or limited pipelines could take. Sales and shipping capacity were rationed.

The oil sands have an even longer record as an environmental hazard. In 1848, British naturalist John
Richardson made a startling entry in his diary of an expedition that crossed the future bitumen mining district.

North of Fort McMurray, “a copious spring of mineral pitch issues from a crevice in a cliff composed of sand and bitumen,” the scientist noted. “Several small birds were found suffocated in the pitch.”
Industry recognition of its hazards is old too. As GCOS pioneered production and Syncrude was built in the mid-1970s, Fitzgerald urged creation of “an entirely autonomous task force” dedicated to environmental protection and funded by provincial oil sands royalties.

He wrote a memorable warning: “The process of learning and overcoming the effects of environmental hazards has been slow, of necessity and due to lack of precedent. In elaborate technical operations, the time lag between identification of dangers and developing the ability to rectify these is often longer than popular opinion considers tolerable. The years when this time lag could be excused, however, are past.”

Three decades later, it is painfully obvious he had an idea whose time has come.