Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

by Andrew Blackwell

  The Suncor bus tour leaves from in front of the OSDC—I stole in for a quick taste of the Dig and Sniff—and it employs one of those same Diversified buses, re-tasked for our touristic needs. Mindy, our perky young tour guide, popped up in front and asked us to buckle our seat belts. “Safety,” she said, “is one of our number-one priorities.” The driver gunned the engine and we were off, about to be taken, Universal Studios-style, through an open wound on the world’s single largest deposit of petroleum. What soaring cliffs and hulking machinery did the day hold for us?

  The bus was nearly full, mostly with families and seniors—people who looked like they had seen the inside of a few tour buses. A quartet of old ladies giggled like they were on a Saturday-night joyride. Sitting next to me was a Mr. Ganapathi, an old Indian man with a single, twisting tooth jutting from his lower jaw.

  “You are married?” he asked.

  I wasn’t, I said. But I thought of the Doctor. It wasn’t a bad idea.

  By now we were passing along the eastern edge of the large tailings pond in front of Syncrude.

  “Is this where all those ducks got killed?” a man asked his wife.

  “Oh, we’ve had more fuss over those ducks!” she said.

  There had indeed been more fuss. The governments of Canada and Alberta had decided to prosecute Syncrude for failing to repulse the ducks from the tailings pond. There would be a not-guilty plea, and complaints from Syncrude that it was being unfairly prosecuted for what amounted to a mistake but not a crime, and counter-complaints from environmentalists that Syncrude was getting off easy. In the end, Syncrude would be found guilty and fined $3 million—$1,868 Canadian for each duck. And if those sound like expensive ducks, keep in mind that in 2009 Syncrude made $3 million in profit every single day.

  We stepped down from the bus near the Syncrude plant—it hissed in the distance—to visit a pair of retired mining machines. You needn’t take the bus tour to see them, though, as they are probably visible from space. I had never seen such machines. A dragline excavator stood on the right; on the left, a bucket-wheel reclaimer.

  These days, oil sands mining uses shovels and trucks in a setup that has a nice scoop-and-haul simplicity to it. But this system is relatively recent. Previously, companies used a system of draglines, bucket wheels, and conveyor belts. With a dragline excavator (a machine probably bigger than your house), a bucket-like shovel hanging on cables from a soaring steel boom would gather up a bucketful of sand—and we’re talking about a bucketful the size of…the size of…hell, I don’t know. What’s bigger than an Escalade but smaller than a bungalow? Big, okay? The dragline would swing around, using the huge reach of the boom, and drop the sand behind it. It would then inch along the face of the mine, walking—actually walking—on gigantic, skid-like feet, repeating the process over and over, leaving behind it a line of excavated sand called a windrow.

  Then the reclaimer would come in, turning its bucket wheel through the sand in the windrow, lifting it onto a conveyor belt on its back, which fed another conveyor belt, and another, transporting the sand great distances out of the pit. There were once thirty kilometers’ worth of conveyor belts operating in Syncrude’s mine, and if you’ve ever tried to keep a conveyor belt running during a harsh northern winter—who hasn’t?—you’ve got an idea of why they finally opted for the shovel-and-truck method.

  To approach the bucket-wheel reclaimer was to slide into a gravity well of disbelief. It was difficult even to understand its shape. It was longer than a football field, battleship gray, its conveyor belt spine running aft on a bridge large enough to carry traffic. The machine’s shoulders were an irregular metal building several stories tall, overgrown with struts and gangways and ductwork, hunched over a colossal set of tank treads. A vast, counterweighted trunk soared over it all, thrusting forward a fat tunnel of trusses that finally blossomed into the great steel sun of the bucket wheel.

  The wheel itself was more than forty feet tall, with two dozen steel mouths gaping from its rim, each worthy of a tyrannosaur, with teeth as large as human forearms. I stared up at it, nursing a euphoric terror, imagining how it once churned through the earth, lifting ton after ton of oily sand as it went. There was something wonderful about the fearsome improbability of the reclaimer’s existence. It was the bastard offspring of the Eiffel Tower and the Queensboro Bridge, abandoned by its parents, raised by feral tanks.

  As my tourmates took pictures of one another standing in front of the behemoth, I walked back to the bus, where the driver was standing with his hands in his pockets. His name was Mohammed. The Suncor bus tour was only a minor part of his job. He spent most of his days ferrying workers to and from the mines. When I asked why he didn’t choose to drive one of the big trucks instead of a bus, he told me he wasn’t interested.

  “But you could make a lot of money,” I said. The salary for driving a heavy hauler started at about a hundred thousand dollars—more if you worked a shovel.

  He smiled. “The pollution. Especially at the live sites, Suncor and Syncrude.” He thought the air coming off the upgrading plants was bad for your health.

  “But you breathe that air anyway,” I pointed out. “You drive onto those sites all the time!”

  He laughed. “Yeah!”

  The supposed centerpiece of the Suncor bus tour is of course Suncor itself. We entered from the highway, the air sweet with tar, and drove toward the Athabasca River into an area invisible from the road. My oil sands fever was reaching its crisis. The upgrading plant slid into view, a forest of pipes and towers similar to the Syncrude plant, but nestled next to the river in a shallow, wooded valley.

  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.

  But there was an undercurrent to his enthusiasm. “I’m part of the mining process instead of part of the solution to fix it up afterwards,” he said. “The budget for reclamation is so small compared with the profits they make.” He shook his head. “They should be dishing out more.” And indeed, only a microscopic portion of oil sands land has ever been certified by the government as reclaimed.

  The answer, he thought, was stronger environmental regulation. But the Alberta government would never make it happen.

  “They’re getting zillions of dollars of royalties,” he said of the province. “If you’ve got land, the government of Alberta will let you go in and take the oil out. They’re interested in profits.”

  The late northern dusk had finally descended. The living room was getting dark.

  “Do you think you’re raping the planet?” I asked.

  Don exhaled. “In terms of pollution, no, we’re not,” he said. “There’s people downstream who say they’re getting cancer from the oil sands operations, but we’re not even putting anything in the water.” But although he didn’t buy claims of carcinogens in the Athabasca River, Don was no climate change skeptic. A huge amount of fuel was being burned to mine oil sands, and to extract and upgrade the bitumen—which meant a huge amount of carbon emissions. And those carbon emissions worried him.

  “I once saw a map of CO2 emissions in North America,” he said. “There was a big fuzz up around Fort McMurray. The CO2 from Fort McMurray is probably the same as from all of Los Angeles.”

  It seemed impossible. Could Fort McMurray really have carbon emissions similar to those of a city literally a hundred times its size?

  Don had a way of saying things I might expect from an environmental activist—yet he was a man who spent his days helping the pit get wider. He embodied, far more than I did, Canada’s contradictory feelings toward the oil sands and the consequences of their extraction.

  But we all share in the paradox. Anyone does who both takes part in civilization and cares about the environment. Civilization sustains and protects us as individuals and communities, but it is more than a mere system for shelter and sustenance and order. It is what we are. The unit of the human organism is not the individual but the society. For better or worse, isolated individuals cannot sustain or further the human race. Only in society does it survive.

  Today that society is an industrial one, resource-hungry and planet-spanning, growing so inefficiently large, we believe, that it is disrupting its own host. It is not strange, then, that some individuals of that society should question its integrity. They wonder whether the very thing that allows them to exist—the thing that they are—is not somehow rotten at its core.

  This is the love-hate relationship in which we are all now engaged, and it is the basis for the entire spectrum of our individual decisions as they relate to the environment. Whether we’re talking about recycling, or voting, or consumer choices, or political agitation, or radical efforts to live off t
he grid, these are all attempts to square the circle, to mitigate—or, more often, to atone for—our individual role in the disquietingly unsustainable system that keeps us alive. It’s not just about living sustainably. It’s about being able to live with ourselves.

  As for Los Angeles, Don had his numbers wrong. Fort McMurray does not emit the same amount of carbon as LA. It emits twice as much.

  With the bus tour such a bust, I turned to finding a scenic overlook. I headed for Crane Lake, a Suncor reclamation site that seemed like a good starting point for some creative sneaking.

  The word reclamation gets tossed around a lot in these parts, and not only in Don’s living room. It is an important concept for anyone who doesn’t want to feel too bad about strip-mining. Reclamation requirements use the vague guideline of “equivalent land capability,” which means, according to the Alberta government, that reclaimed land has to be “able to support a range of activities similar to its previous use.”

  And that’s the key here—its previous use. What, previously, was the use of an undisturbed boreal forest? What if its main use was to remain undisturbed?

  I drove. I was in my little rental car, underneath a thick sunshine that was pushing back the afternoon’s storm clouds. The highway was slick with rain and heavy with traffic. It was the beginning of the evening shift change. Work in the mines is divided into two shifts per day, and every twelve hours fresh battalions of truck drivers, shovel operators, plant workers, and engineers come hurtling up Highway 63. The road is long and straight, and the waves of pickup trucks and red and white buses had worked up to an insistent, humming speed. It was at that moment—as I approached the turnoff for Crane Lake, followed by a speeding phalanx of cars and buses—that I saw the ducks.

  They came waddling onto the highway from the right shoulder, from the direction of Crane Lake. A mother and six ducklings.