Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
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 under-
lying 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
