Andrew Blackwell - Visit Sunny Chernobyl - And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

It was getting hard to pay proper attention to the scenery. Mindy had been keeping up an unrelenting stream of patter, a barrage of factoids that, despite its volume, managed to be completely uninformative. I found it difficult to follow her, even with my inborn enthusiasm for pipes and conveyor belts and giant cauldrons of boiling oil.

The green building houses the fart matrix. It uses 1.21 gigawatts of electricity every femtosecond.

The what matrix? Wait, which tower was—

…three identical towers of different sizes on the far side of the plant—can everybody see?

No, wait, which?

Good. Those are where the natural solids ascend and descend twenty-one times per cycle, each cycle producing ten metric tons of nougat, which is sold to China, because it can’t be stored so close to the river. The interiors of the towers have to be cleaned every two weeks using high-pressure ejaculators. Wow!

As we passed over the river—the river from which Suncor extracts about 180 million gallons of water per week—Mindy threw us a few bones of actual information. One point five million barrels of bitumen come out of the oil sands every day, she said, and Suncor had four thousand employees working on the project, which ran twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year.

Underneath the avalanche of information, we were becoming dissatisfied. When would the drive-by of the upgrading plant and the mine’s logistical centers end and the actual oil sands tour start?

“Are we going to get close to one of these trucks?” growled a man in the back.

Mindy smiled. “I’m going to try!” she said. But of what her trying consisted, we will never know.

The bus continued down the road, past a few nice pools of sludge, the occasional electric shovel dabbling in the muck, and a couple of flares. In a bid to drown our curiosity before we mutinied, Mindy had begun a spree of pre-emptive greenwashing. Suncor was required by law, she told us, to “reclaim” all the land it used, meaning it was supposed to restore it, magically, to its state before the top two hundred feet of soil was stripped off and the underlying oil sands pulled out. As for the Athabasca River, if we were worrying about whatever it was that everyone was worrying about, we shouldn’t.

“We’re very limited in terms of what we can take during times of low flow in the river,” she said.

Thank goodness. And had we noticed all the trees? Suncor had already planted three and a half million trees, she chirped. There were Canadian toads, Bufo hemiophrys, living fulfilling lives on this very land.

We had reached the far outside edge of the mine—a dark rampart of earth. A huge chute was built into the embankment—it was the hopper that fed the oil sands into the crusher. It sat distant and lonely, unvisited. Mindy checked her boxes as we passed: hopper, crusher, building, pipe, and we left it behind. The bus parked and we were allowed to descend, for the inspection of a large tire sitting in the parking lot of the mine’s logistical headquarters.

We weren’t going to get the merest peek into the mine. Here on the oil sands bus tour, we weren’t going to see any trucks in action, any shovels, any actual oil sands. Here I was, ready to embrace some corporate PR with open arms, and even I thought it sucked.

The air reeked of tar. I had a headache. We got back on the bus. Mindy had some more information for us, something about how every ton of oil sand saves a puppy. She did not seem to have any realistic enthusiasm for oil sands mining, only a plastic version of the touchy, defensive pride endemic to the entire venture of oil sands PR. It’s just distasteful to watch an oil company try to prove that it is not only environmentally friendly but also somehow actually in the environmental business. Instead of straight talk from a man with a pipe wrench, we have to tolerate oil company logos that look like sunflowers, and websites invaded by butterflies and ivy. (As of this writing, www.suncor.com presents the image of an evergreen sapling bursting through a lush tangle of grass.) Who are they trying to convince? Themselves?

On the way back to the upgrading plant, I noticed some activity next to the hopper, on the high rampart above the extraction facility. There were a pair of haulers backing toward the chute, each piled high with oil sand.

I clambered over Sri Ganapathi, straining for a clear view through the far side of the bus, snapping pictures as one of the dump trucks began to raise its bed to drop its cargo into the chute. But as it did, we passed behind a building and the scene disappeared. Mindy was going for the green jugular, telling us how Suncor had planted so much vegetation on its land that deer came to live there.

“There’s no hunting allowed,” she said. “So they’re pretty happy.” Suncor, you see, is not a multibillion-dollar petroleum company, but a haven in which deer and toads can live in peace. I wanted to spit.

The view came clear and I saw the second truck. Four hundred tons of sticky, black earth—a solid mass as large as a two-story building, and enough to make two hundred barrels of oil—slid smoothly off its upturned bed and down the maw of the hopper. I had the sensation of having seen an actual physical organ of the animal otherwise known as our voracious appetite for fossil fuels. The appetite belongs to a body—a body with many mouths, some of them built into the sides of open pits in Alberta.

The trucks lowered their beds, heading out for the next load, and the next. I had seen the human race take a tiny bite out of the world. The bus drove on. Nobody was watching.

“So, are we raping the planet?” asked Don.

We were sitting in the living room.

Based on the morning’s utter bust of an oil sands bus tour, I said it was hard to declare with any certainty whether he and Amy were in fact raping the planet. I did hint, though, that there was room for competition in the oil sands bus tour niche.

After so much mealymouthed blather on the tour and at the OSDC, it was refreshing to talk to Don. But even he seemed fundamentally ambivalent. Don was an oil sands engineer, but he also had a degree in environmental science. He had begun his career on the reclamation side, and he talked eagerly about what was possible with a former mine site—even if his own company had only begun to reclaim the areas it had dug up.

“You can put overburden back in the mine at the end,” he said. Overburden is the word used to describe the earth that is stripped off to reveal the resources underneath. (It’s tempting to draw conclusions based on this word—that strip-miners see the landscape and forests only as “burdens.”) In the reclamation process, the overburden, now free of vegetation, can be tossed back in the hole to help patch it up.

“Then you do replanting,” Don continued. “Get the hill made, get it sculpted, build little lakes and marshes.” He described the sequence of plantings that would follow, slowly restoring the land to something like what had been there before. And just like that, as if icing a cake, you could have your environment back.

But Don said he was better as a geologist than as an environmental scientist. So now his job was to build Syncrude’s geological model, based on test data from areas to be mined in the coming years and decades. Bitumen richness, water content, grain size, rock types—there were dozens of measurements. Don integrated it all into a database that would allow the company to decide exactly where to mine, where to set its pits and its benches, where to put the shovels.

“I’m in awe of that,” he said. He was in charge of the mining database of one of Canada’s most profitable companies.