Before the Alberta oilsands were a moneymaker
Development costs were in the millions but return on investment had yet to materialize
Twelve years after the Great Canadian Oilsands company began near Fort McMurray, Alta., it had yet to deliver results.
"Getting oil out of the sands and then making it saleable is still a fledgling technology which does not always work," said CBC reporter Terry Milewski in a story for The National on July 31, 1979.
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Pictures showed the gargantuan machines and the crews that operated them to mine the oil, which was trapped in the sandy earth of the region in the province's north.
Great Canadian Oil Sands, which was affiliated with the American Sunoco company, was $35 million "in the red," said Milewski.
Aside from the mining itself, the refinery on site had been shut down by a fire.
The story was much the same at Syncrude, another oilsands operation nearby that was a consortium of oil companies and two levels of government.
"It turns out that tar sand is practically tougher than the equipment used to mine it," said Milewski.
"Tar sand" was a common expression at the time, but CBC style now considers the term inaccurate. The bitumen extracted from the soil is eventually refined into oil, but tar comes from trees and coal.
Together the two companies were producing 75,000 barrels of oil per day — less than half of the amount projected five years earlier.
That oil also cost about four times the projected price, and even if Syncrude could bring its price down to $20 a barrel, the cost of getting the company off the ground didn't seem like a good bargain to Alberta NDP Leader Grant Notley.
"The idea that self-sufficiency means we're not hostage to the Arab oil states, that's technically correct," he said. "But we will be hostages to massive capital advances ... that will be just so costly."
"By the time we get through paying them, we'll wish we were paying the Arab oil magnates."
Milewski said a third oilsands plant, Alsands, had been approved in principle — although, he noted, its cost was such that it would "make Syncrude look cheap."
The plant was farther north than the other two, and a map of the site showed a new townsite to accommodate an influx of workers.
But in the end, the Alsands project collapsed.
By 1997, the oilsands were booming, according to the Globe and Mail.
"In a major advance, Suncor [formerly Great Canadian Oil Sands] began using huge shovels and trucks to mine the oil sands in 1992, and Syncrude soon followed," read the article, headlined "Alberta's oil sands come of age."
