No rash predictions were on display when the Conklin Resource Development Advisory Committee held a lively spring fair on May 14 in its hamlet 130 kilometers southeast of Fort McMurray. Travelers who stumbled on the event, which was neither advertised nor sought publicity, took away one clear message. The industry and the Metis settlement alike want development provided it can be done co-operatively and cleanly. The pace and order of projects will depend on economic and political conditions that no one liable to be held responsible for predictions likes even to guess about.

The committee is a pioneer exercise in pooling wisdom from across the oil sands spectrum. There is equal representation from the Conklin Community Association and an industry collective called Southern Athabasca Oilsands Producers.

Few outsiders have heard of the place. But it is a spot to watch. Bonnie Evans, a community relations consultant with oil sands experience since the 1960s who pieced together the structure, describes Conklin as the bitumen belt’s potential second aboriginal boom town after Fort McKay, the bustling Cree town in the heart of the mining district north of Fort McMurray. Conklin occupies the corresponding location in the bigger region where the Athabasca deposit is more deeply buried and tapped with in-situ underground thermal production systems currently led by SAGD, short for steam-assisted gravity drainage.

If all projects currently approved or working through the regulatory process go ahead, industry applications and impact assessments show Conklin’s population will multiply more than 50-fold into a range of 5,000 to 7,500.

“There’s the good and the bad,” says Margaret Quintal, whose Metis family has lived in and around Conklin for two centuries. “There are job and business opportunities. There is also a lot of disturbance of the land.”

She straddles the old native and new industrial worlds, saying “I try to strike a balance.” She has a son, Osborne, who still makes a significant part of his family’s living as a fur trapper. As owner and manager of Quintal Contracting Ltd., she generates livelihoods for 24 neighbors who provide janitorial, water and security services for oil sands developers.

“It’s an advantage and a disadvantage,” agrees Edward Adby, a senior Metis community leader and representative on the industrialization advisory committee. “The disadvantage is the possibility of pollution of the land and water and emissions in the air. The advantage is employment opportunities.”

Old Conklin mainstays trapping, berry picking and forest fire fighting are increasingly haphazard ways to make a living, Adby says. Even fire fighting, formerly the region’s main source of cash, has become more difficult because provincial authorities lately introduced safety and proficiency training requirements.

Adby has done all the traditional activities. But he has also built EA Consulting Services Inc. into a healthy firm providing oil sands developers with van and bus transportation, labor crews, and equipment and personnel for plant maintenance and spill cleanups.

He expects Conklin’s development advisory committee to keep industry accountable for clean operations and sharing benefits with the community. And there are encouraging early signs. Oil companies footed the bill, for instance, for a new public safety program that for the first time gives Metis settlements south of Fort McMurray full-time RCMP policing. The cost, $780,000, is about 10 times more than the annual budget that Conklin receives for local services as part of the Fort McMurray-based Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo. There is more friction with the oil sands capital than the industry in Conklin, where local leaders say fledgling plants already generate $15 million in annual taxes that the bigger city siphons off and keeps.

Unlike the mega-mines north of Fort McMurray, the in-situ extraction projects of the Conklin area mostly proceed in unspectacular stages of wells and heat injection systems that grow gradually. The pace has slowed down since the 2008 oil price drop and onset of global financial crisis. But the Conklin spring industry fair showed work is not halting and is poised to accelerate as economic conditions improve.

StatOilHydro has hired native community relations specialists and is pressing ahead on a potential megaproject despite environmental protests staged in its native Norway by Greenpeace International. Petrobank Energy and Resources Ltd. has applied for regulatory approval of a commercial version of its Whitesands experiment with a new underground bitumen combustion technology. Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., EnCana Corp., ConocoPhillips Canada, Devon Canada, MEG Energy Corp., Enerplus Resources and Korea National Oil Corp. are in varying stages of advancing in-situ extraction projects to be built in phases. Enbridge Inc. expects to make a start this year on building new local landmarks two jumbo tanks, and a pipeline to keep up with gradually growing Conklin production.