Word: bitumen
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...city, the attackers burrowed beneath the walls in order to breach the Roman defenses; the Romans heard this and started digging a countermine to fend off the assault. But the Persians, James told TIME, "prepared a nasty surprise," pumping lethal fumes from a brazier burning sulfur crystals and bitumen, a tarlike substance, with bellows into the Roman tunnels. The brazier was only doused, James suggests, "when the screaming stopped." Afterward, the Persians stacked the Roman corpses in a wall to prevent any reprisal, then lit the scene on fire...
...says Crisby, a fiftyish manager at Syncrude Canada Ltd., a company that is the Incredible Hulk of North America's biggest and richest resource deposit: Alberta's oil sands. The idea of filling the 60,000-seat home of the Toronto Blue Jays (now called Rogers Centre) with sticky, bitumen-laced soil from the Aurora North mine in a weekend is mind-boggling. But it puts the business conducted on this chunk of boreal real estate into perspective: there are 173 billion bbl. of crude contained in an area roughly the size of Florida. It just...
...bigger issue for Canada is that Alberta will get locked into the upstream rungs of an integrated North American energy market, while high-tech jobs head south, along with raw bitumen. "A Wild West approach to development is raising costs and acting as a disincentive for big energy companies to invest in upgrading and refining operations in Alberta," says Gil McGowan, head of the Alberta Federation of Labour, the province's largest union, representing 140,000 workers...
...they all have their foot on the gas. At the Aurora North mine, a giant shovel fills up another 797B Caterpillar heavy hauler with a 400-ton load of material that--after being spun in what looks like the world's largest cement mixer to separate the bitumen from the sand--will eventually yield 200 bbl. of oil. "A year from now, that mountain won't be there," says Crisby, referring to the black wall of bitumen-rich soil gradually being demolished by shovel, dozer and a convoy of heavy haulers that operate around the clock...
...century. January 2002 was the bottom. At it's all-time low then, the Canadian dollar was worth just less than 62 U.S. cents. Recovery since then, dramatic and steady, began with something as dull as a rise in oil prices. With that, the laborious process of drawing viscous bitumen out of Alberta's oil sands became ever more viable. Massive shovels churned the earth, digging up the tons of sand needed to produce each barrel of oil. New pipelines were laid. Alberta's already hot economy hurtled forward...