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Scraping Bottom: The Canadian Oil Boom
Once considered too expensive, as well as too damaging to the land, exploitation of Alberta’s oil sands is now a gamble worth billions.
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Photograph by Peter Essick
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Photograph by Peter Essick
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Photograph by Peter Essick
Squeezing Sand for Oil At the bottom of a mine, a giant shovel devours sand and delivers it to trucks like this three-story, four-million-dollar Caterpillar, which muscle up to 400 tons at a time to extraction plants.]]>
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Photograph by Peter Essick
Squeezing Sand for Oil At the extraction plant, bitumen is separated from sand in a hot-water wash. As the bitumen rises to the top of the wash, Suncor employee Lee Flett skims off wood, leaves, and other debris before the sticky load is sent to an upgrading facility that converts it to synthetic crude oil.]]>
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Photograph by Peter Essick
Squeezing Sand for Oil Sand, water, and bitumen residues are finally piped to a tailings pond, where the water is extracted, cleaned, and reused in the mines.]]>
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Photograph by Peter Essick
Squeezing Sand for Oil Oil sands surface mining operates on extreme scales, with crews working around the clock through hot summers and subzero winters to feed heavy demand.]]>
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Photograph by Peter Essick
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Photograph by Peter Essick
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Photograph by Peter Essick
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Photograph by Peter Essick
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Photograph by Peter Essick
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Photograph by Peter Essick
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Photograph by Peter Essick
Portraits of a Boomtown More streets are laid for mobile-home neighborhoods in Fort McMurray. The average single-family house costs about $540,000, steep even in a region where wages regularly top $80,000 a year.]]>
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Photograph by Peter Essick
Portraits of a Boomtown A worker tamps sod at a new development in Fort McMurray, where the oil boom has spawned a building explosion.]]>
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Photograph by Peter Essick
Portraits of a Boomtown Drivers pack Thickwood Boulevard in Fort McMurray during the morning commute. The oil boom has lured thousands here, from unemployed fishermen from eastern provinces to immigrant nannies longing for Canadian citizenship.]]>
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Photograph by Peter Essick
Portraits of a Boomtown Prosperity eludes many, including Janice "Jazzy" Desjarlais (at left) and Cameron McGillvery, who struggle with Alberta's increasingly common challenges of high living costs, unemployment, and homelessness.]]>
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Photograph by Peter Essick
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Photograph by Peter Essick
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Photograph by Peter Essick
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Photograph by Peter Essick
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Photograph by Peter Essick