The history of science is crammed with anecdotes of discovery, and inventing oil sands production is no exception.

The Greek scientist Archimedes is reputed to have jumped out of his bath and run naked through the streets of Syracuse, Sicily, shouting “Eureka” after hitting on the principle of using buoyancy to measure the volume of an object with an irregular shape. Charles Goodyear is said to have discovered vulcanization of rubber by accidentally dropping some raw rubber on a hot stove.

Then there’s Karl Clark’s washing machine.

Clark, an Alberta scientist, in 1920 commandeered his wife’s washing machine, threw in a bucket of oil sands, a measure of caustic soda and agitated the mixture with hot water. Bitumen separated and floated to the surface.

There seems to be no record of how agitated Clark’s wife was. But his process was the first workable way to get oil from the sticky ore of tarry sand in northeast Alberta. It was an idea whose time hadn’t quite come. Nearly half a century passed before Great Canadian Oil Sands Ltd., ancestor of Suncor Energy Inc., began commercial production in Fort McMurray in 1967.

The second and biggest plant, Syncrude Canada, began as a research consortium of oil companies in 1964. Construction of the first Syncrude commercial operation began in 1973 and it took until 1978 for its first oil to flow. The research arm of the operation never stopped.

To Cheryl Robb, Syncrude’s media relations adviser, and many of the 100 staff and scientists at the company’s research center in south Edmonton, this is the stuff of history books. A new generation is looking for ways to make its own history and its own breakthroughs at the bright facility, ergonomically designed to allow researchers easy ways to collaborate and disseminate ideas.

The $20-million center, built in 1994, is the industry’s only in-house research facility. If something is new and state of the art in bitumen extraction, it likely came from there. Syncrude spends $50 million a year on research through lean and flush times alike.

“Knowing everything there is to know about what you’re doing” is a good way to describe what Syncrude does, Robb says. “What we do at research is to find ways to do things better and doing it the best way that we can.”

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