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The Patch: The People, Pipelines, and Politics of the Oil Sands
Bestselling author Chris Turner brings readers onto the streets of Fort McMurray, showing the many ways the oilsands impact our lives and demanding that we ask the In order to both fuel the world and to save it, what do we do about the Patch?In its heyday, the oilsands represented an industrial triumph and the culmination of a century of innovation, experiment, engineering, policy, and finance. Fort McMurray was a boomtown, the centre of a new gold rush, and the oilsands were reshaping the global energy, political, and financial landscapes. The future seemed limitless for the city and those who drew their wealth from the bitumen-rich wilderness. But in 2008, a new narrative for the oilsands emerged. As financial markets collapsed and the scientific reality of the Patch’s effect on the environment became clear, the region turned into a boogeyman and a lightning rod for the global movement combatting climate change. Suddenly, the streets of Fort McMurray were the front line of a high-stakes collision between two conflicting worldviews—one of industrial triumph and another of environmental stewardship—each backed by major players on the world stage. The Patch is the seminal account of this ongoing conflict, showing just how far the oilsands reaches into all of our lives. From Fort Mac to the Bakken shale country of North Dakota, from Houston to London, from Saudi Arabia to the shores of Brazil, the whole world is connected in this enterprise. And it requires us to ask the In order to both fuel the world and to save it, what do we do about the Patch?
370 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2017
23 people are currently reading
483 people want to read
About the author
Chris Turner
10 books37 followersCHRIS TURNER is an award-winning author and one of Canada’s leading writers and speakers on climate change solutions and the global energy transition. His bestsellers The Leap and The Geography of Hope were both National Business Book Award finalists. His feature writing has earned nine National Magazine Awards. He lives in Calgary with his wife, Ashley Bristowe, and their two children.
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There is more than one author with this name
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January 28, 2018
4.8 stars
THE PATCH: THE PEOPLE, PIPELINES, and POLITICS OF THE OIL SANDS about the oil sands industry written by Canadian author Chris Turner looks at the social aspects, political aspects and environmentalism.
This book is very interesting and educational, a product of Turner's intensive research. He tells the history of the Patch - of the first people interested in the land and the discovery of the oil in Northern Alberta right up to present day conflict between the industrialists and the environmentalists. Chris Turner 'sheds light' on particulars previously left unsaid or intentionally ignored by each side.
"...the whole world is connected in this enterprise. And it requires us to ask the question: In order to both fuel the world and to save it, what do we do about the Patch?" - Quote from Book Description
Special thanks to Simon & Schuster Canada and NetGalley for a digital copy of this book providing me an opportunity to read it and write my thoughts about it.
THE PATCH: THE PEOPLE, PIPELINES, and POLITICS OF THE OIL SANDS about the oil sands industry written by Canadian author Chris Turner looks at the social aspects, political aspects and environmentalism.
This book is very interesting and educational, a product of Turner's intensive research. He tells the history of the Patch - of the first people interested in the land and the discovery of the oil in Northern Alberta right up to present day conflict between the industrialists and the environmentalists. Chris Turner 'sheds light' on particulars previously left unsaid or intentionally ignored by each side.
"...the whole world is connected in this enterprise. And it requires us to ask the question: In order to both fuel the world and to save it, what do we do about the Patch?" - Quote from Book Description
Special thanks to Simon & Schuster Canada and NetGalley for a digital copy of this book providing me an opportunity to read it and write my thoughts about it.
April 14, 2023
This is not a review but is based on an interview I had with the author. It was originally published in the Georgia Straight newspaper.
Chris Turner has a request for Canadians: he wants everyone to step back from debates on Alberta’s oil sands, take a deep breath, and make the time to better understand what it is we’re shouting about.
“I think, for something that is as prominent in Canadian politics as it has become, the actual facts of the case…are not really well understood,” Turner says on the phone from his hometown of Calgary. “There is little understanding of what the thing actually is.”
To help us out, Turner has put the story of the oil sands (also known as the tar sands) into a book. Not an attack or a defence, he emphasizes. Just the story. The result is The Patch: The People, Pipelines, and Politics of the Oil Sands, which Simon & Schuster publishes on September 19.
“The book was conceived with the idea that there is extraordinarily heated rhetoric, pro and con,” Turner tells the Straight. “But even if there were not another dollar invested in it today, it would continue to operate for another quarter-century. We have to come to terms with it on some level.”
It’s a story that begins in the early Cretaceous period, more than 120 million years ago. Skipping ahead a bit, Turner recounts the Geological Survey of Canada’s first formal visit to the Athabasca region, made by Robert Bell in the early 1880s. Bell’s report from that trip states “the bitumen deposits might be so vast as to one day warrant a pipeline to the Hudson Bay,” Turner writes. A bit later, in the 1920s, a Prince Edward Island real-estate speculator named Robert Fitzsimmons arrived in Fort McMurray. In 1936, he built an “elaborate industrial age marvel carved out of the thickly wooded wilderness”. Over the next 50 years, progress continued at varying speeds and with stops and start, but Alberta’s oil sands was on its way.
It’s fascinating history and continues for a bit, but most of The Patch covers contemporary affairs. Turner spent a year researching the book. He was based in Calgary, but also spent more than two months in the oil sands’ boomtown of Fort McMurray and visited the more remote Fort Chipewyan.
That time on the ground allowed Turner to paint a nuanced picture of Fort McMurray especially. The city he describes isn’t the rowdy row of dive bars and strip clubs that so many newspaper articles have made it out to be. Sure, the downtown core has a roughneck chip to it, Turner concedes. But the Fort Mac that he got to know is a good place to raise a family and a shining example of Canadian multiculturalism. Turner describes how he arrived at that more accurate picture as involving a bit of luck.
“Hotel prices are extraordinarily high during the week,” he explains. “And so I thought I would see if Airbnb is a thing in Fort McMurray.…It is. And so I wound up staying out in one of the newest suburbs.
“It helped me get a truer sense of the place and why some of the people who I profile in the book really love it there,” he adds.
A personal touch and colourful anecdotes are the book’s core strengths. Turner introduces us to Raheel Joseph, for example, a 33-year-old immigrant from Pakistan who drives a bus from Fort McMurray to various oil-sands projects, back and forth each day. Through his eyes, Turner provides a perspective on the oil sands from a group few Canadians think about: its army of support staff.
“The Suncor base site, like all the oil sands mining sites, is a sprawling industrial city,” he writes in the book. “The mining complex has its own exit on Highway 63, so when Raheel Joseph arrives around half past six, he pilots his Diversified bus down a dedicated off-ramp that gives way to an access road, winding past three massive workforce accommodation complexes.…As Joseph steers his bus northward again, the industrial city’s central business district comes into view.”
Another character with a very different vantage point is Harbir Chhina, an engineer and executive working for Cenovus who occupies a window office on the 26th floor of the Bow Building in downtown Calgary.
“He talks about next-generation technologies—not just elaborate, expensive bolt-on gear that might sequester carbon dioxide from a SAGD [steam-assisted gravity drainage] plant deep beneath the ground but also the sci-fi stuff,” Turner writes. “Technologies that will take a CO2 stream…and convert it back into synthetic fuel, closing the emissions loop for good.”
Turner ruffled conservative feathers with his 2013 book, The War on Science: Muzzled Scientists and Wilful Blindness in Stephen Harper’s Canada, and not everyone he sought for an interview welcomed him into their office.
He reports that not a single corporation mining the oil sands allowed him even to set foot on any of their project sites. (Suncor was the exception, but only by way of Turner purchasing a ticket for the company’s public tour.)
“It was disappointing,” Turner says. “The industry is not particularly threatened by coverage; they have just decided not to cooperate with it.…I personally think, even from their own strategic point of view, it’s an error. I don’t think they win anything by hiding.”
While that was somewhat expected, Turner says he was surprised by the extent to which some oil-sands opponents were similarly opaque. Tom Steyer, for example, an American hedge-fund manager who bankrolled opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline—which would run from the oil sands to the Gulf of Mexico—did not respond to requests. Every attempt Turner made to meet with members of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation’s band council were also met with silence.
Despite challenges of access, Turner has provided a holistic account of one of the largest industrial developments in human history.
Short tangents throughout the book provide richly detailed descriptions of various facets of oil-sands operations. Things like the colossal Cat 797 dump trucks that move nearly 400 tons of oil sands’ ore per load, and the private airline operators that ferry hundreds of thousands of short-term workers to and from dozens of work camps each year. There’s also a short aside on Fort McMurray’s cricket club. And explanations of industry technologies likes steam-assisted gravity drainage, scientific techniques deployed to analyze the oil-sands’ environmental impacts, and safety equipment such as propane-fired sound cannons that warn migratory birds to stay far away from toxic tailings ponds.
The book also covers politics with an aim to provide a peak behind the curtain of key moments in oil-sands developments—for example, an account of a 2008 visit former Alberta premier Ed Stelmach made to the White House for a meeting with Dick Cheney.
“They had fifteen minutes to state their case to the vice-president,” it reads. “Then the phone would ring, Cheney would answer it and that would be their signal to leave.
“Cheney had been to Alberta on a hunting trip, so he and [resource development minister] Ted Morton chatted about that,” the book continues. “When the phone rang, the vice-president picked it up briefly and said something short and quiet into the receiver and put it back down. They kept talking. The meeting stretched longer than half an hour.”
The story of the oil sands that Turner recounts is one that stretches from Alberta to Washington, D.C., to far-flung locations like remote oil fields in Soviet Russia.
“This is a much more complex story than the one that is generally being told,” Turner says. “And quite a fascinating one.”
Chris Turner has a request for Canadians: he wants everyone to step back from debates on Alberta’s oil sands, take a deep breath, and make the time to better understand what it is we’re shouting about.
“I think, for something that is as prominent in Canadian politics as it has become, the actual facts of the case…are not really well understood,” Turner says on the phone from his hometown of Calgary. “There is little understanding of what the thing actually is.”
To help us out, Turner has put the story of the oil sands (also known as the tar sands) into a book. Not an attack or a defence, he emphasizes. Just the story. The result is The Patch: The People, Pipelines, and Politics of the Oil Sands, which Simon & Schuster publishes on September 19.
“The book was conceived with the idea that there is extraordinarily heated rhetoric, pro and con,” Turner tells the Straight. “But even if there were not another dollar invested in it today, it would continue to operate for another quarter-century. We have to come to terms with it on some level.”
It’s a story that begins in the early Cretaceous period, more than 120 million years ago. Skipping ahead a bit, Turner recounts the Geological Survey of Canada’s first formal visit to the Athabasca region, made by Robert Bell in the early 1880s. Bell’s report from that trip states “the bitumen deposits might be so vast as to one day warrant a pipeline to the Hudson Bay,” Turner writes. A bit later, in the 1920s, a Prince Edward Island real-estate speculator named Robert Fitzsimmons arrived in Fort McMurray. In 1936, he built an “elaborate industrial age marvel carved out of the thickly wooded wilderness”. Over the next 50 years, progress continued at varying speeds and with stops and start, but Alberta’s oil sands was on its way.
It’s fascinating history and continues for a bit, but most of The Patch covers contemporary affairs. Turner spent a year researching the book. He was based in Calgary, but also spent more than two months in the oil sands’ boomtown of Fort McMurray and visited the more remote Fort Chipewyan.
That time on the ground allowed Turner to paint a nuanced picture of Fort McMurray especially. The city he describes isn’t the rowdy row of dive bars and strip clubs that so many newspaper articles have made it out to be. Sure, the downtown core has a roughneck chip to it, Turner concedes. But the Fort Mac that he got to know is a good place to raise a family and a shining example of Canadian multiculturalism. Turner describes how he arrived at that more accurate picture as involving a bit of luck.
“Hotel prices are extraordinarily high during the week,” he explains. “And so I thought I would see if Airbnb is a thing in Fort McMurray.…It is. And so I wound up staying out in one of the newest suburbs.
“It helped me get a truer sense of the place and why some of the people who I profile in the book really love it there,” he adds.
A personal touch and colourful anecdotes are the book’s core strengths. Turner introduces us to Raheel Joseph, for example, a 33-year-old immigrant from Pakistan who drives a bus from Fort McMurray to various oil-sands projects, back and forth each day. Through his eyes, Turner provides a perspective on the oil sands from a group few Canadians think about: its army of support staff.
“The Suncor base site, like all the oil sands mining sites, is a sprawling industrial city,” he writes in the book. “The mining complex has its own exit on Highway 63, so when Raheel Joseph arrives around half past six, he pilots his Diversified bus down a dedicated off-ramp that gives way to an access road, winding past three massive workforce accommodation complexes.…As Joseph steers his bus northward again, the industrial city’s central business district comes into view.”
Another character with a very different vantage point is Harbir Chhina, an engineer and executive working for Cenovus who occupies a window office on the 26th floor of the Bow Building in downtown Calgary.
“He talks about next-generation technologies—not just elaborate, expensive bolt-on gear that might sequester carbon dioxide from a SAGD [steam-assisted gravity drainage] plant deep beneath the ground but also the sci-fi stuff,” Turner writes. “Technologies that will take a CO2 stream…and convert it back into synthetic fuel, closing the emissions loop for good.”
Turner ruffled conservative feathers with his 2013 book, The War on Science: Muzzled Scientists and Wilful Blindness in Stephen Harper’s Canada, and not everyone he sought for an interview welcomed him into their office.
He reports that not a single corporation mining the oil sands allowed him even to set foot on any of their project sites. (Suncor was the exception, but only by way of Turner purchasing a ticket for the company’s public tour.)
“It was disappointing,” Turner says. “The industry is not particularly threatened by coverage; they have just decided not to cooperate with it.…I personally think, even from their own strategic point of view, it’s an error. I don’t think they win anything by hiding.”
While that was somewhat expected, Turner says he was surprised by the extent to which some oil-sands opponents were similarly opaque. Tom Steyer, for example, an American hedge-fund manager who bankrolled opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline—which would run from the oil sands to the Gulf of Mexico—did not respond to requests. Every attempt Turner made to meet with members of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation’s band council were also met with silence.
Despite challenges of access, Turner has provided a holistic account of one of the largest industrial developments in human history.
Short tangents throughout the book provide richly detailed descriptions of various facets of oil-sands operations. Things like the colossal Cat 797 dump trucks that move nearly 400 tons of oil sands’ ore per load, and the private airline operators that ferry hundreds of thousands of short-term workers to and from dozens of work camps each year. There’s also a short aside on Fort McMurray’s cricket club. And explanations of industry technologies likes steam-assisted gravity drainage, scientific techniques deployed to analyze the oil-sands’ environmental impacts, and safety equipment such as propane-fired sound cannons that warn migratory birds to stay far away from toxic tailings ponds.
The book also covers politics with an aim to provide a peak behind the curtain of key moments in oil-sands developments—for example, an account of a 2008 visit former Alberta premier Ed Stelmach made to the White House for a meeting with Dick Cheney.
“They had fifteen minutes to state their case to the vice-president,” it reads. “Then the phone would ring, Cheney would answer it and that would be their signal to leave.
“Cheney had been to Alberta on a hunting trip, so he and [resource development minister] Ted Morton chatted about that,” the book continues. “When the phone rang, the vice-president picked it up briefly and said something short and quiet into the receiver and put it back down. They kept talking. The meeting stretched longer than half an hour.”
The story of the oil sands that Turner recounts is one that stretches from Alberta to Washington, D.C., to far-flung locations like remote oil fields in Soviet Russia.
“This is a much more complex story than the one that is generally being told,” Turner says. “And quite a fascinating one.”
December 23, 2019
"How could someone justify what this is doing to the land, the water, the air, the whole planet’s climate? How could it be wrong to deliver people the fuel they need every day of their lives? There is no common ground. And that is how both sides lose."
"The Patch" does a lot more than frame the issues, provide historical context and give flesh and humanity to the people at the centre -- though it does all those things remarkably well. It also demonstrates the unique Canadianness of the issue, the "messy compromises," the obsession with both-sides rhetoric that fails to prevent black-and-white with-us-or-against-us arguments, the inability to drive forward, unequivocal motion in any given direction. We approve pipelines and introduce carbon pricing. We set climate targets and work closely with petroleum producers. We want change, but don't have the stomach for what that might look like. And, meanwhile, real people, with families to feed and ways of life to preserve, are caught in the middle, used as political pawns by both sides of this divisive issue.
And so it goes on. Nothing gets done, and everyone loses.
"The Patch" is not going to make you feel good about the state of climate action, in Canada or the world. It doesn't make excuses for the Patch, nor for the demand that helps it grow, nor for the shaky interpretations of scientific studies that continue to sow widespread confusion. It certainly doesn't provide easy answers, or reassurances, or a rallying battle cry for definitive, world-saving action.
But it does tell stories, long ignored and distorted. It presents complex studies in accessible ways. It will broaden your understanding, untangle the politics, reveal the many moving parts that bifurcate our perspective on something as huge and, at the same time, as localized as the Alberta oil sands. And it will crystalize the reasons the Patch has been chosen to answer for the climate sins of all humankind.
In short, "The Patch" is a cogent feat of journalism, and it ought to be required reading for any Canadian who wants to understand how we got here, and why we can't seem to move forward in a way that works for everyone--or anyone at all.
"The Patch" does a lot more than frame the issues, provide historical context and give flesh and humanity to the people at the centre -- though it does all those things remarkably well. It also demonstrates the unique Canadianness of the issue, the "messy compromises," the obsession with both-sides rhetoric that fails to prevent black-and-white with-us-or-against-us arguments, the inability to drive forward, unequivocal motion in any given direction. We approve pipelines and introduce carbon pricing. We set climate targets and work closely with petroleum producers. We want change, but don't have the stomach for what that might look like. And, meanwhile, real people, with families to feed and ways of life to preserve, are caught in the middle, used as political pawns by both sides of this divisive issue.
And so it goes on. Nothing gets done, and everyone loses.
"The Patch" is not going to make you feel good about the state of climate action, in Canada or the world. It doesn't make excuses for the Patch, nor for the demand that helps it grow, nor for the shaky interpretations of scientific studies that continue to sow widespread confusion. It certainly doesn't provide easy answers, or reassurances, or a rallying battle cry for definitive, world-saving action.
But it does tell stories, long ignored and distorted. It presents complex studies in accessible ways. It will broaden your understanding, untangle the politics, reveal the many moving parts that bifurcate our perspective on something as huge and, at the same time, as localized as the Alberta oil sands. And it will crystalize the reasons the Patch has been chosen to answer for the climate sins of all humankind.
In short, "The Patch" is a cogent feat of journalism, and it ought to be required reading for any Canadian who wants to understand how we got here, and why we can't seem to move forward in a way that works for everyone--or anyone at all.
June 21, 2020
This was an incredibly well researched and thorough book about Canada’s oil sands. I appreciated the nuanced and balanced approach the author took - so much so that I was actually unclear on how he personally felt about the tar sands until the last chapter of the book. His key thesis is that the oil sands, Fort McMurray, and Canada’s relationship with oil are complicated, and we don’t do ourselves any favours by pretending they aren’t. Highly recommend!
December 1, 2025
This is in some ways a love letter to Fort McMurray. I think it's not quite what I expected based on the marketing. It focuses much more on the city of Fort McMurray than on the pipeline. That's not to say it doesn't look at pipelines and the science behind them, but that it's just as much about the history of Alberta and pipelines than the politics. Actually, thinking back to the title, maybe the marketing WAS accurate. The ending was excellent, the beginning was good, and the middle was quite mixed. Some chapters I loved, others I found to be a slog. Still, a good read for someone looking to learn more.
August 7, 2020
*100th Climate book!*
Chris Turner is one of my favourite Canadian environmental journalists (if you aren't familiar enough with environmental journalists to recognize them and have favourites, what are you doing with your life, really?); he also lives and writes in Alberta, where the tar sands are located. And at this point, if you're even glancingly familiar with the climate fight, you know what the tar sands are, and you probably have an opinion about it, and that opinion very likely centres on when the whole operation should be shut down, ranging from "sometime in the 1990s" through "yesterday" to "within the 2030s." Just a guess.
Let Turner's book tell you all of the things you don't already know (or think you know).
And I mean *all.* Would you like an in-depth description of the technology of tar sands extraction? Of the apparatus and infrastructure transmitting the oil from northern Alberta to southern Texas? Of the processing and transport of bitumen? It's in here. Would you like to hear about the tar sands from the perspective of the discoverers, inventors, engineers, business owners, entrepreneurs, local immigrants to Fort McMurray from all over Canada and the world, environmental activists, indigenous communities profiting from the tar sands, indigenous communities experiencing downstream effects, indigenous Canadians working in the tar sands? They're all in here. Would you like in-depth analysis of the scientific studies examining the environmental impacts of the tar sands on wildlife, plant communities, water bodies, climate change? Also in here.
So it is, in a phrase, massively educational. No matter what you know about the tar sands already, you will learn something you didn't know, and you will be surprised.
Turner is sympathetic to the residents of the tar sands and the workers, he loves Fort McMurray, and he has (what I think is) appropriate admiration for the technological advances required to mine the bitumen. But he's also clear-eyed about the climate costs of the endeavour and the necessity to get to zero emissions as quickly as possible. Practically, this means there's probably something for everyone to hate in this book, but it also means it will challenge you, in the best possible way. It's a great book about one of the main battlefields of 21st century climate politics, and not even an ounce polemical. Highly recommended.
Chris Turner is one of my favourite Canadian environmental journalists (if you aren't familiar enough with environmental journalists to recognize them and have favourites, what are you doing with your life, really?); he also lives and writes in Alberta, where the tar sands are located. And at this point, if you're even glancingly familiar with the climate fight, you know what the tar sands are, and you probably have an opinion about it, and that opinion very likely centres on when the whole operation should be shut down, ranging from "sometime in the 1990s" through "yesterday" to "within the 2030s." Just a guess.
Let Turner's book tell you all of the things you don't already know (or think you know).
And I mean *all.* Would you like an in-depth description of the technology of tar sands extraction? Of the apparatus and infrastructure transmitting the oil from northern Alberta to southern Texas? Of the processing and transport of bitumen? It's in here. Would you like to hear about the tar sands from the perspective of the discoverers, inventors, engineers, business owners, entrepreneurs, local immigrants to Fort McMurray from all over Canada and the world, environmental activists, indigenous communities profiting from the tar sands, indigenous communities experiencing downstream effects, indigenous Canadians working in the tar sands? They're all in here. Would you like in-depth analysis of the scientific studies examining the environmental impacts of the tar sands on wildlife, plant communities, water bodies, climate change? Also in here.
So it is, in a phrase, massively educational. No matter what you know about the tar sands already, you will learn something you didn't know, and you will be surprised.
Turner is sympathetic to the residents of the tar sands and the workers, he loves Fort McMurray, and he has (what I think is) appropriate admiration for the technological advances required to mine the bitumen. But he's also clear-eyed about the climate costs of the endeavour and the necessity to get to zero emissions as quickly as possible. Practically, this means there's probably something for everyone to hate in this book, but it also means it will challenge you, in the best possible way. It's a great book about one of the main battlefields of 21st century climate politics, and not even an ounce polemical. Highly recommended.
Read
July 16, 2019This book covers just about every non-fiction topic - history, current affairs, politics, economics, business, Indigenous affairs, environment and personal stories. It will give the reader a better understanding of the Fort McMurray area. There is a lot of information to digest here, but very interesting.
November 28, 2017
A very, very good book about an important subject that everyone should know something about. Turner is clever and careful to report honestly on the situation and clearly showing some truth in the operations in northern Alberta. Excellent book.
February 5, 2018
Despite the author's personal ideology, Turner delivered a very balanced book illustrating how both sides of the climate change debate are entrenched in their positions, and the real impacts that oil sands politics can have on the ordinary working person in and around Fort McMurray. This book is a great primer for anyone who is interested in a better understanding of the main factors at play in Canada's quest to become both a global climate leader and an energy superpower.
January 13, 2019
A must read for every Canadian.
November 24, 2024
Very well researched and interesting book about the Alberta oil patch. The author does a great job stating the facts while not coming across pro or anti oil and gas. I think anyone working downtown Calgary or in one of the many oil and gas towns of northern Alberta would enjoy this book.
“The twenty-first century will be defined by how civilization reconciles its powerful hunger for energy with the toll taken on the planet’s basic equilibrium.”
“In 2015, oil companies produced a total of 869.3 million barrels of oil from all of Alberta’s oil sands operations. Production peaked at a record level of nearly 2.6 million bpd in July, but in other months, production dipped to 2.2 million bpd.”
“The record year for capital expenditures in the oil sands was 2014, when oil companies and energy investors around the world spend 34 billion.”
“The major oil strikes that birthed the first oil boomtowns and eventually the whole global oil industry occurred in the mid 1800’s – at Titusville, Pennsylvania; Petrolia, Ontario; and Baku, Azerbaijan – and Canadian geologists began to take note of the fossil fuel wealth along the Athabasca River soon after.”
“In the case of the McMurry Formations first real wildcatter, this was literally the case: Alfred von Hammerstein, a German immigrant who claimed he was a Prussian noble, arrived in Fort McMurry in 1897 en rout to the Klondike gold rush in the Yukon. Ignoring the ready money to be made in furs, von Hammerstein’s passions settled instead on the promise of becoming the first oil baron of the Great Northwest.”
“Around the Palliser Hotel in downtown Calgary, where many oilmen lived and kept offices in the early days of Alberta’s oil business, there was one lease in particular that came to be known as Gilberts Folly. It would eventually become Suncor’s Firebag River in situ operation, production 200,000 bpd.”
“Imperial Oil spend years drilling 133 dry wells in the Canadian prairie before the Leduc No. 1 strike in February 1947 finally launched large-scale oil production to Alberta.”
“There was a half serious proposal back in the 1950s, notorious in the business, to detonate a nuclear bomb in the middle of this deeper deposit, liquifying it and – so it was hoped – creating something like a conventional oil reservoir that might yield to standard wells and pumpjacks.”
“Lougheed was a forceful but cautious champion of Alberta’s fossil fuel resourced. He pushed for slow orderly development in the oil sands and established a sovereign wealth fund, the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund, to collect 30 percent of all fossil fuel revenues and save their mounting value for future generations of Albertans.”
By 1996, SAGD was ready for its first commercial test. Encana Corporation, a major Canadian natural gas company, built the first pilot well at Foster Creek, 200 kilometers southeast of Fort McMurry.”
“The heart of a SAGD production facility is essentially a large power plant run on natural gas – specifically a cogeneration plant, which takes in water and burns natural gas to produce steam and electricity. A large portion of the electricity is superfluous to the plant’s requirements and flows onto the provincial power grid, a sort of by-product generated alongside the plant’s vital steam production.”
“Governing it all is a single merciless statistic: the steam-to-oil ration or SOR. This is a simple metric indicating how much steam is being used per unit of oil produced. It is tracked and tweaked in the in situ business more zealously that the price of oil. Well new is situ technologies and operations working less robust deposits often fall in the range of 4:1 to 6:1. At Cenovus’s highest-performing Christina Lake well pads, the SOR has dropped to as low as 1.8 to 1.”
“During the boom years, Calgary emerged as Canada’s number two city for corporate headquarters, a bigger business hub than Montreal or Vancouver, second only to Toronto and gaining fast.”
“And of all the 90-odd million barrels of oil in all the world’s daily supply, none is more highly contested -0 none to date has had is necessity as thoroughly audited – as the 2.4 million barrels extracted daily from the patch.”
“The entire carbon footprint of the oil sands was smaller than that of just the fleet of coal-fired power plants in the state of Wisconsin. This is not longer accurate, but they remain smaller than the coal emissions of Missouri and seven other states.”
“New Glasgow is the industrial hub of Pictou County and home to the Sobeys grocery empire, and the pizza in town is know for its distinctive tangy sauce, an Anglophilic brown concentration with a flavour like nothing else you can find on pizza anywhere else.”
“If the Alberta government has continued to put the 30 percent per year of non-renewable resource revenue into the fund Lougheed has mandated, it would of contained more than $125 billion at the start of 2008; instead it held just $16 billion.”
“A 2012 analysis by university of Victoria climate scientists Andrew Weaver and Neil Swart in the journal Nature Climate Change shrunk the Patch’s carbon bomb even further. Looking only at proven reserves, Weaver and Swart calculated that extracting and burning 166 billion barrels would increase average global temperature by 0.02 degrees Celsius. And if only reserves currently under active development were combusted, they wrote, the warming would be almost undetectable on a global scale.”
“Oil sands projects draw about 170 million cubic meters of water from the Athabasca River each year – equal to about 1 percent of its average flow – as part of their everyday operations.”
“Canada’s political culture is, in any case, cautious and consensus seeking. It was not designed for radical change or rapid transformation. It doesn’t do revolution. In many ways, it seems a poor fit to respond to the extraordinary challenge to the status quo posed by climate change, ill-suited to the total reimagination of the very foundations of modern civilization the crisis obliges.”
“This is the patch’s great lesson: The climate crisis took generations to create. It will take a generation or more to solve.”
“There is no set of policies so flawless and no social movement of such undeniable force that the industrial order that spend two hundred years building a system to justify and replicate itself will simply crumble away to usher in a new system boasting the perfect political efficiency that would be needed to make 100% Possible manifest the world over in a decade.”
“Climate change, again, is not a campaign. It won’t be beaten. We wont win. We will either change our daily lives and industrial basis of our societies, or we won’t, over years and decades. In mean little increments.”
“The twenty-first century will be defined by how civilization reconciles its powerful hunger for energy with the toll taken on the planet’s basic equilibrium.”
“In 2015, oil companies produced a total of 869.3 million barrels of oil from all of Alberta’s oil sands operations. Production peaked at a record level of nearly 2.6 million bpd in July, but in other months, production dipped to 2.2 million bpd.”
“The record year for capital expenditures in the oil sands was 2014, when oil companies and energy investors around the world spend 34 billion.”
“The major oil strikes that birthed the first oil boomtowns and eventually the whole global oil industry occurred in the mid 1800’s – at Titusville, Pennsylvania; Petrolia, Ontario; and Baku, Azerbaijan – and Canadian geologists began to take note of the fossil fuel wealth along the Athabasca River soon after.”
“In the case of the McMurry Formations first real wildcatter, this was literally the case: Alfred von Hammerstein, a German immigrant who claimed he was a Prussian noble, arrived in Fort McMurry in 1897 en rout to the Klondike gold rush in the Yukon. Ignoring the ready money to be made in furs, von Hammerstein’s passions settled instead on the promise of becoming the first oil baron of the Great Northwest.”
“Around the Palliser Hotel in downtown Calgary, where many oilmen lived and kept offices in the early days of Alberta’s oil business, there was one lease in particular that came to be known as Gilberts Folly. It would eventually become Suncor’s Firebag River in situ operation, production 200,000 bpd.”
“Imperial Oil spend years drilling 133 dry wells in the Canadian prairie before the Leduc No. 1 strike in February 1947 finally launched large-scale oil production to Alberta.”
“There was a half serious proposal back in the 1950s, notorious in the business, to detonate a nuclear bomb in the middle of this deeper deposit, liquifying it and – so it was hoped – creating something like a conventional oil reservoir that might yield to standard wells and pumpjacks.”
“Lougheed was a forceful but cautious champion of Alberta’s fossil fuel resourced. He pushed for slow orderly development in the oil sands and established a sovereign wealth fund, the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund, to collect 30 percent of all fossil fuel revenues and save their mounting value for future generations of Albertans.”
By 1996, SAGD was ready for its first commercial test. Encana Corporation, a major Canadian natural gas company, built the first pilot well at Foster Creek, 200 kilometers southeast of Fort McMurry.”
“The heart of a SAGD production facility is essentially a large power plant run on natural gas – specifically a cogeneration plant, which takes in water and burns natural gas to produce steam and electricity. A large portion of the electricity is superfluous to the plant’s requirements and flows onto the provincial power grid, a sort of by-product generated alongside the plant’s vital steam production.”
“Governing it all is a single merciless statistic: the steam-to-oil ration or SOR. This is a simple metric indicating how much steam is being used per unit of oil produced. It is tracked and tweaked in the in situ business more zealously that the price of oil. Well new is situ technologies and operations working less robust deposits often fall in the range of 4:1 to 6:1. At Cenovus’s highest-performing Christina Lake well pads, the SOR has dropped to as low as 1.8 to 1.”
“During the boom years, Calgary emerged as Canada’s number two city for corporate headquarters, a bigger business hub than Montreal or Vancouver, second only to Toronto and gaining fast.”
“And of all the 90-odd million barrels of oil in all the world’s daily supply, none is more highly contested -0 none to date has had is necessity as thoroughly audited – as the 2.4 million barrels extracted daily from the patch.”
“The entire carbon footprint of the oil sands was smaller than that of just the fleet of coal-fired power plants in the state of Wisconsin. This is not longer accurate, but they remain smaller than the coal emissions of Missouri and seven other states.”
“New Glasgow is the industrial hub of Pictou County and home to the Sobeys grocery empire, and the pizza in town is know for its distinctive tangy sauce, an Anglophilic brown concentration with a flavour like nothing else you can find on pizza anywhere else.”
“If the Alberta government has continued to put the 30 percent per year of non-renewable resource revenue into the fund Lougheed has mandated, it would of contained more than $125 billion at the start of 2008; instead it held just $16 billion.”
“A 2012 analysis by university of Victoria climate scientists Andrew Weaver and Neil Swart in the journal Nature Climate Change shrunk the Patch’s carbon bomb even further. Looking only at proven reserves, Weaver and Swart calculated that extracting and burning 166 billion barrels would increase average global temperature by 0.02 degrees Celsius. And if only reserves currently under active development were combusted, they wrote, the warming would be almost undetectable on a global scale.”
“Oil sands projects draw about 170 million cubic meters of water from the Athabasca River each year – equal to about 1 percent of its average flow – as part of their everyday operations.”
“Canada’s political culture is, in any case, cautious and consensus seeking. It was not designed for radical change or rapid transformation. It doesn’t do revolution. In many ways, it seems a poor fit to respond to the extraordinary challenge to the status quo posed by climate change, ill-suited to the total reimagination of the very foundations of modern civilization the crisis obliges.”
“This is the patch’s great lesson: The climate crisis took generations to create. It will take a generation or more to solve.”
“There is no set of policies so flawless and no social movement of such undeniable force that the industrial order that spend two hundred years building a system to justify and replicate itself will simply crumble away to usher in a new system boasting the perfect political efficiency that would be needed to make 100% Possible manifest the world over in a decade.”
“Climate change, again, is not a campaign. It won’t be beaten. We wont win. We will either change our daily lives and industrial basis of our societies, or we won’t, over years and decades. In mean little increments.”
May 23, 2019
I worked in the patch for 5 years and spent my time in and out of Fort Mac and Calgary. This book was great, it went beyond just the industry and touched on the cultural aspects of living and working in Fort Mac and the FIFO culture behind the oil sands. I was concerned it would be overly pro-oil by the cover (and the fact I discovered it at the Fort Mac airport) but I was surprised that it was quite unbiased and covered both sides of the debates surrounding the patch. Great read for anyone working in o&g or interested in learning more about oil and pipelines.
April 17, 2020
I really struggled with this one. Despite the author pointing out the blatant attack by environmental extremists, he obviously is against the tar sands. The statistics so doctored, the USA only interested in its own agenda, time and time again I am DISGUSTED by the unfair treatment and "witch hunt" mentality of those looking to use the tar sands TO RALLY IDIOTS against it as a political point for so called climate change instead of holding the HUGE CARBON COUNTRIES LIKE CHINA ACCOUNTABLE! Disgusting!
October 20, 2017
Oil reached an all-time peak of $145 a barrel in 2008. Then came the Great Recession. Prices for West Texas oil tumbled to an historic low of $26.55 per barrel in January, 2016. They have since almost doubled, to around $51 today. And further increases are coming, according to the U.S. Energy Administration. It predicts oil will average $52 a barrel in 2018, rising to $75 by 2020, $109 by 2040, and peaking at $116 in 2050 (all in 2017 dollars).
Talk about a mug's game!
Forecasts like these are usually upset by unforeseen, or even expected, events. Who foresaw the Great Recession? Who could have predicted that Saudi Arabia would decide to pump surplus oil into the market in order to knock down prices -- and so drive new competitors, like the shale oil industry in the United States,and the Alberta oil sands in Canada, toward bankruptcy.
Anyone who thinks Big Oil is here to stay should read Chris Turner's epic history of the oil sands, The Patch: The People, Pipelines, and Politics of the Oil Sands. In it, he analyzes how that stretchof oil-drenched loam and sand in northern Alberta has been dug into, carved up, and generally desecrated.
Turner, a veteran Calgary author and journalist, is not anti-oil sands. He's more interested in how the rise of the oil sands and its capital, Fort McMurray, has affected the people involved -- everyone from local Indigenous, to Newfoundland fishermen and Pakistani immigrants who found work tapping into the underground wealth of that northern terrain.
Turner begins The Patch with an account of a small environmental disaster: the death of 1,601 ducks who landed on a Syncrude tailings pond in the middle of a snowstorm. They thought they'd found a safe haven, but didn't understand that what they took for open water was actually a tarry mix of oil, heavy metals, and chemicals.
From that debacle, Turner goes on to recount early attempts to develop the oil sands. He describes how corporate America came to the scene with the arrival of Sun Oil in the 1950s, becoming a partner in a consortium called Great Canadian Oil Sands.
By 2006, Turner writes, "twice as many Newfoundlanders worked in Alberta as there were employed in the decimated fishery back home." Then came the twin disasters of the Great Recession and the "The Beast," the fire that enveloped much of Fort McMurray and the surrounding oil sands territory.
Turner reports on environmental studies that present "a powerful litany of abuses." He adds: "The oil sands is the largest new source of carbon pollution in Canada -- but its emissions intensity per barrel has been dropping steadily for years."
Despite this, Turner says, "A thing of such scope and power and wealth as The Patch doesn't go away overnight or in a few years. Building the entire industrial basis of modern society on a new energy regime does not happen overnight or in a few years. We will have The Patch for years, decades ... We are all stakeholders. We are all complicit."
When the Energy East pipeline was cancelled a few weeks ago, it was admitted that market forces -- a declining need for new pipelines beyond the Kinder Morgan in B.C. and the Keystone XL in the States -- were the main factor in the decision.
Less attention was paid to the announcements of a string of car companies from General Motors to Volvo that they would be phasing out gasoline models in favour of electric vehicles over the next ten to fifteen years. With two-thirds of world oil production now going to power cars, buses, trucks and planes, can oil be anything but a declining force in a future of electric vehicles?
I began my writing career with an article about the oil sands that the Rocky Mountain Oil Reporter published in the 1950s. It was one of the first pieces to recognize that a great new industry was soon to come into being. I congratulated myself on the $12 check I received.
Now, the oil sands are one of the most widely written about industries in the world. In The Patch, Chris Turner has written a book that brings to life a significant slice of modern Canada. But perhaps his book also signals the last great hurrah for Big Oil.
Talk about a mug's game!
Forecasts like these are usually upset by unforeseen, or even expected, events. Who foresaw the Great Recession? Who could have predicted that Saudi Arabia would decide to pump surplus oil into the market in order to knock down prices -- and so drive new competitors, like the shale oil industry in the United States,and the Alberta oil sands in Canada, toward bankruptcy.
Anyone who thinks Big Oil is here to stay should read Chris Turner's epic history of the oil sands, The Patch: The People, Pipelines, and Politics of the Oil Sands. In it, he analyzes how that stretchof oil-drenched loam and sand in northern Alberta has been dug into, carved up, and generally desecrated.
Turner, a veteran Calgary author and journalist, is not anti-oil sands. He's more interested in how the rise of the oil sands and its capital, Fort McMurray, has affected the people involved -- everyone from local Indigenous, to Newfoundland fishermen and Pakistani immigrants who found work tapping into the underground wealth of that northern terrain.
Turner begins The Patch with an account of a small environmental disaster: the death of 1,601 ducks who landed on a Syncrude tailings pond in the middle of a snowstorm. They thought they'd found a safe haven, but didn't understand that what they took for open water was actually a tarry mix of oil, heavy metals, and chemicals.
From that debacle, Turner goes on to recount early attempts to develop the oil sands. He describes how corporate America came to the scene with the arrival of Sun Oil in the 1950s, becoming a partner in a consortium called Great Canadian Oil Sands.
By 2006, Turner writes, "twice as many Newfoundlanders worked in Alberta as there were employed in the decimated fishery back home." Then came the twin disasters of the Great Recession and the "The Beast," the fire that enveloped much of Fort McMurray and the surrounding oil sands territory.
Turner reports on environmental studies that present "a powerful litany of abuses." He adds: "The oil sands is the largest new source of carbon pollution in Canada -- but its emissions intensity per barrel has been dropping steadily for years."
Despite this, Turner says, "A thing of such scope and power and wealth as The Patch doesn't go away overnight or in a few years. Building the entire industrial basis of modern society on a new energy regime does not happen overnight or in a few years. We will have The Patch for years, decades ... We are all stakeholders. We are all complicit."
When the Energy East pipeline was cancelled a few weeks ago, it was admitted that market forces -- a declining need for new pipelines beyond the Kinder Morgan in B.C. and the Keystone XL in the States -- were the main factor in the decision.
Less attention was paid to the announcements of a string of car companies from General Motors to Volvo that they would be phasing out gasoline models in favour of electric vehicles over the next ten to fifteen years. With two-thirds of world oil production now going to power cars, buses, trucks and planes, can oil be anything but a declining force in a future of electric vehicles?
I began my writing career with an article about the oil sands that the Rocky Mountain Oil Reporter published in the 1950s. It was one of the first pieces to recognize that a great new industry was soon to come into being. I congratulated myself on the $12 check I received.
Now, the oil sands are one of the most widely written about industries in the world. In The Patch, Chris Turner has written a book that brings to life a significant slice of modern Canada. But perhaps his book also signals the last great hurrah for Big Oil.
May 25, 2019
Tar sands, oil sands, Athabasca Oil Sands, the economic driver of Canada, Mordor. These are a few of the names for Alberta’s Oil sands, or as they are c asked in Fort Mac/ Alberta, the Patch.
So much of Canada’s energy history is marred by half truths, political games, and biscuits campaigns. It’s hard to understand the oil sands. Turner’s “The Patch” is a rare and important book. By taking a balanced approach, the reader can learn about the oil sands in a neutral, balanced way.
Turner takes us through the history of the oil sands from their formation to 2017. He describes the people who work on the rigs, in Calgary, Washington, Ottawa, and beyond. Turner explains the pro-Business side’s arguments as well as the environmentalist group’s arguments.
The Patch shines where other books on Canadian energy fall flat. Turner isn’t afraid to call out lies or challenger assumptions. He shows Fort Mac is more than a boom town full of drugs and prostitutes, that the oil sands are more than just Mordor, and that the oil sands are not the end all and be all of our economy and economic future. Turner takes a balanced approach to he oil sands, one of economic and environmental necessity. We must keep producing, but also aggressively shift to renewable energy.
The Patch is a well written, engaging, and through provoking read. I’d encourage everyone to give it a read.
So much of Canada’s energy history is marred by half truths, political games, and biscuits campaigns. It’s hard to understand the oil sands. Turner’s “The Patch” is a rare and important book. By taking a balanced approach, the reader can learn about the oil sands in a neutral, balanced way.
Turner takes us through the history of the oil sands from their formation to 2017. He describes the people who work on the rigs, in Calgary, Washington, Ottawa, and beyond. Turner explains the pro-Business side’s arguments as well as the environmentalist group’s arguments.
The Patch shines where other books on Canadian energy fall flat. Turner isn’t afraid to call out lies or challenger assumptions. He shows Fort Mac is more than a boom town full of drugs and prostitutes, that the oil sands are more than just Mordor, and that the oil sands are not the end all and be all of our economy and economic future. Turner takes a balanced approach to he oil sands, one of economic and environmental necessity. We must keep producing, but also aggressively shift to renewable energy.
The Patch is a well written, engaging, and through provoking read. I’d encourage everyone to give it a read.
June 12, 2022
The Patch provides a fairly nuanced and comprehensive overview of the development and present state of the Alberta oil sands (at least circa 2017). As Alberta undergoes another more restrained boom in response to high global oil prices, the lessons of the past are prescient. As the book highlights, the Alberta oil sands have been maligned as an especially evil environmental catastrophe that poses outsized threats to the global climate. In reality, the oil sands’ overall impact on the global climate are small, bordering on insignificant. Undoubtedly, there are local environmental impacts such as the destruction of significant swaths of boreal forest that will one day (hopefully) be fully reclaimed. However; the media and environmental allegations of significant air and water pollution are so far unfounded. After such a nuanced overview of the oil sands, I was shocked to learn that the author was formerly a Green Party candidate and is a climate change activist himself. I have to give significant credit to the author for providing a fact-based overview of the oil sands despite his strong ties to environmentalist causes that are largely hysterical about the oil sands.
September 4, 2019
How to write a solid non-fiction book:
1. Admit your biases and political position.
2. Do research and discover that the main backers in a major debate have both been a little dishonest and/or wrong. Make an effort to understand why each side holds these views.
3. Acknowledge that there are no easy solutions but that an intelligent, science-backed conversation needs to be had.
Turner does all these things in a remarkably fair and forthright book. This is not a journalist trying to give every side its due, but rather Turner does a good job in demonstrating why each side in the debate about the oil sands makes the arguments they do. Turner's main argument that the oil sands became a bulls-eye for the environmental movement and were then blown out of proportion is set forth convincingly, while at the same time the economic benefits for Alberta and the environmental costs are not ignored.
1. Admit your biases and political position.
2. Do research and discover that the main backers in a major debate have both been a little dishonest and/or wrong. Make an effort to understand why each side holds these views.
3. Acknowledge that there are no easy solutions but that an intelligent, science-backed conversation needs to be had.
Turner does all these things in a remarkably fair and forthright book. This is not a journalist trying to give every side its due, but rather Turner does a good job in demonstrating why each side in the debate about the oil sands makes the arguments they do. Turner's main argument that the oil sands became a bulls-eye for the environmental movement and were then blown out of proportion is set forth convincingly, while at the same time the economic benefits for Alberta and the environmental costs are not ignored.
November 19, 2019
How often will you ever read a book that describes a timeline in history, which includes the emergence of a new technology, current world politics, global commerce and overarching it all the fact that you and your family were there?
This is an exceptional and well written book that tracks the many stories that surround the "Patch". It's the type of book that pulls you in fast and leads you over, under and around all the many aspects of what defines the Canadian oil industry, our indigenous people, the land itself and the worlds perspective of it all.
Having a husband, two sons, a brother and a nephew all working in different areas of the Patch starting in 2005, I was reading this book from a different perspective than perhaps others will. The book still holds all the elements of a great read.
I recommend everyone read this to get a very broad and well define view of the oil industry and the "Patch" specifically.
This is an exceptional and well written book that tracks the many stories that surround the "Patch". It's the type of book that pulls you in fast and leads you over, under and around all the many aspects of what defines the Canadian oil industry, our indigenous people, the land itself and the worlds perspective of it all.
Having a husband, two sons, a brother and a nephew all working in different areas of the Patch starting in 2005, I was reading this book from a different perspective than perhaps others will. The book still holds all the elements of a great read.
I recommend everyone read this to get a very broad and well define view of the oil industry and the "Patch" specifically.
November 6, 2017
In “Patch: The People, Pipelines, and Politics of the Oil Sands” which I received through Goodreads Giveaways Chris Steward gives historical and contemporary insight into the political, economic, and environmental issues which vex the oil sands in Alberta beginning in the prologue with the ecological disaster of migratory ducks caught in a tailings pond, to the catastrophes of the Great Recession and the fire that enveloped Fort McMurray.
Well-researched and absorbing, the author paints a vivid picture of conflict between those who make their living from the industry and those who want to hinder its future growth. This is not only a story about the oil sands but about Fort McMurray and should not only enthrall Canadians but should speak to readers globally.
Well-researched and absorbing, the author paints a vivid picture of conflict between those who make their living from the industry and those who want to hinder its future growth. This is not only a story about the oil sands but about Fort McMurray and should not only enthrall Canadians but should speak to readers globally.
December 22, 2017
Disclaimer: thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for a galley-proof of this title in exchange for a fair review.
Having read other books by Chris Turner, I anticipated a biased, polemic read.
I was wrong. While the first chapter indicated that the book might be a bit apocalyptic, the remainder, I thought was treated in a very even-handed way.
In spite of the fact that execs from only three oil sands company would speak to Turner, he seems to have done his research thoroughly.
The history of oil sands development is fascinating. He gives a human face to Fort MacMurray and the people that earn their livelihood there.
His treatment of Indiginous concerns is especially poignant, something not given nearly enough notice elsewhere.
Highly recommended for everyone.
Having read other books by Chris Turner, I anticipated a biased, polemic read.
I was wrong. While the first chapter indicated that the book might be a bit apocalyptic, the remainder, I thought was treated in a very even-handed way.
In spite of the fact that execs from only three oil sands company would speak to Turner, he seems to have done his research thoroughly.
The history of oil sands development is fascinating. He gives a human face to Fort MacMurray and the people that earn their livelihood there.
His treatment of Indiginous concerns is especially poignant, something not given nearly enough notice elsewhere.
Highly recommended for everyone.
December 25, 2017
This is an excellent book demonstrating the many pressures the
Oil Sands of Alberta face while trying to supply oil to a world that is thirsty for more. Fort McMurray is a beautiful town that is home to 80,000 people, many of whom rely on “the Patch” for their living. Fort Chipewyan is a settlement built on the fur trade and now reliant on the oil industry. The people in the settlement are afraid to drink the water or eat the animals they trap, but they live with a balance between their personal prosperity and environmental sustainability. The oil industry feels it had a story to tell, but environmentalists don’t want to hear it. This book has broadened my perspective as I am sure it will for anyone who reads it. Highly recommended.
Oil Sands of Alberta face while trying to supply oil to a world that is thirsty for more. Fort McMurray is a beautiful town that is home to 80,000 people, many of whom rely on “the Patch” for their living. Fort Chipewyan is a settlement built on the fur trade and now reliant on the oil industry. The people in the settlement are afraid to drink the water or eat the animals they trap, but they live with a balance between their personal prosperity and environmental sustainability. The oil industry feels it had a story to tell, but environmentalists don’t want to hear it. This book has broadened my perspective as I am sure it will for anyone who reads it. Highly recommended.
January 3, 2018
A refreshingly balanced perspective on the oil sands industry in Alberta. Turner’s book serves neither as uncritical boosterism for the industry nor a rabid critique of it. The book delves into the complex technical nature of the oil sands, while stepping back and illustrating its role in the wider debates about energy, climate and progress. However, it is Turner’s view into the human lives impacted by the industry, from Pakistani coach drivers, to engineers working out ways to separate the stubborn sand from oil, to First Nations trappers is what makes this book so engaging to read.
Whatever your perspective is on the oil sands, this book will change it for the better.
Whatever your perspective is on the oil sands, this book will change it for the better.
January 3, 2019
Very informative write-up on the operations in Northern Alberta. As someone who has stayed at many of the camps and worked on a few of these sites, I feel a tad bit of nostalgia of the boom. The oil sands have woken up to a nightmare this last year and a bit and people have been hurting. I enjoyed the down to earth approach Mr. Turner used in conveying the stories of those with boots on the ground. I think fundamentally oil will not be going anywhere but it is good to look for alternatives in progressing our future. Great book and will be interesting how the future of the oil sands will continue to shape Canada's history and the world.
October 31, 2020
If you're going to read one book about the oil sands, you could definitely do worse. By all accounts it is a very good book on an extremely divisive subject. The praise in these reviews shows as much.
Some of my criticisms might be editorial ones--there's a circularity to the narrative that is unsatisfying at times and the conclusion in some ways rearticulates the deadlock or impasse of the fossil fuel economy. There are many reasons for this, I'm sure, but it does seem to me that in its pursuit of balance, some of the troubling (in my opinion) industry talking points that reinforce this deadlock appear in ways that read as unconscious.
Some of my criticisms might be editorial ones--there's a circularity to the narrative that is unsatisfying at times and the conclusion in some ways rearticulates the deadlock or impasse of the fossil fuel economy. There are many reasons for this, I'm sure, but it does seem to me that in its pursuit of balance, some of the troubling (in my opinion) industry talking points that reinforce this deadlock appear in ways that read as unconscious.
September 2, 2019
In a sea of misinformation, this is an excellent book that collects and puts forward the history, culture, scale, problems and triumphs of the Athabasca Oil Sands "Patch". Of particular interest are the numbers relating to its percentage of the Canadian economy, its carbon footprint, its ongoing carbon reductions compared to global consumption and global production, and it's local environmental impact. The numbers are rather shocking. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to gain a broad, accurate picture of what's actually happening up there.
March 22, 2020
A very readable, balanced book that tells the story of the development of Alberta’s oils sands over the past 100 years. I picked up this book just before Alberta’s first case of the Coronavirus and about a week prior to the current Global Price war on oil. Needless to say, my level of distraction has been high and the content of this book, while accurate and thorough, quickly seems ‘dated’. Hoping Chris Turner writes another book in a years time as I’d love to hear his thoughts on the impact of the virus and the potential long term impacts on the Patch and the global environment.
April 17, 2018
An amazing account of THE PATCH. This is a no nonsense approach to what is and has been happening there. Oh, yes, lots of politics involved and groups protesting, uninformed as usual. Protect your homeland. Chris Turner has in his book covered, I believe everything possible and in looking at every prospect of THE PATCH. This is a very informed read.
I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.
I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.
February 11, 2019
Alberta holds the third largest oil reserves in the world, and the largest of any stable democracy. Do they represent a century of global energy security or a climate disaster in the making? Turner cuts through the rhetoric on both sides and investigates the impacts The Patch has on the economy, politics, the boom (and bust) towns in the west. Must read for anyone interested in energy and the environment.
April 14, 2019
I was hoping for more stats. Some of the points are interesting comparing corporate objectives and environmentalist objectives. It does a good job explaining how the oil sand project becomes a target for environmentalist attack. I thought some of the descriptions are longer than necessary which makes the reading a little dry, but overall, it was educational even for someone who is working in the oil sand industry.
October 18, 2017
A great mix of personal, human stories and historical facts which make for a great overall perspective on life in the oil sands. Chris Turner has done a tremendous job of weaving together a great deal of information into something that is easily readable, and accessible for anyone with a desire to learn more about life in Fort McMurray.
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