Bitumen: The People, Performance and Passions behind Alberta’s Oil Sands

My oil sands book, now on Kindle.

Rather amazingly, in my little world, AmazonI recently posted my award-winning book Bitumen: The people, performance and passions behind Alberta's oil sands, on Kindle; here's a link. 

This book covers the written record of Alberta's oil sands - the world's second-largest petroleum resource - from 1715 to the present day. The focus is on men and women who contributed to the enormous scientific and technological advances that enabled the oil sands sector to become a petroleum giant. Equally, it reviews recent developments that make much of the sector at best marginally economic.

According to renowned petroleum historian Earle Gray, the book "is a powerful addition to the corpus of writing about Canada’s petroleum industry. But it is more than history: it is an account of current challenges and visions of future possibilities. While he focuses on the vast oil deposits in the Alberta oil sands, he also sheds wide-ranging light on other aspects of the Canadian petroleum industry’s history.

"The author "has woven his story from an impressive array of diverse sources, as well as intensive and extensive research," Gray continues in his foreword. "The result is a must-read for anyone interested not only in the history of the Canada’s oil business, but perhaps more importantly, Canada’s economic history."

Review, by Aaron Rynd

Bitumen: The People, Performance and Passions behind Alberta’s Oil Sands

by Peter McKenzie-Brown (2017)

This book is a milestone in that no history of Alberta’s oil sands can be written without taking it into account. More than that, no such history can be written without using McKenzie-Brown’s sources.

There are three explanations for the book’s importance. First, McKenzie-Brown was the principal driving force behind the Oil Sands Oral History Project. Anyone who touched the development of the oil sands was approached, and it is difficult to imagine anyone alive having more knowledge of the sector than McKenzie-Brown. Second, the world is entering an energy era shrouded in uncertainty except that it will differ enormously from the past. Now is the time to take stock, because the rules of the game are changing. Third, as Muhlstein brought a deep and broad understanding of the background to Cavelier de La Salle in her 1992 study, showing both the man’s stature and his feet of clay, so McKenzie-Brown knows the background of what he describes in this book.

Bitumen keeps its promise: it presents the people whose efforts gave birth and nourished the oil sands project. The reader comes to know them, their successes and failures. If successes dot these pages, so do the plans that perished. The pioneers of the oil sands rose, but also sank back into the obscurity of time. Bitumen portrays their passion, for that is what the oil sands became for these men, an emotional journey. Was it also the source of a fatal flaw? They had logic and argument aplenty. Without the desire to create a new industry, the oil sands would never have experienced lift-off. And yet the height at which hubris forms is never revealed before it’s too late.

“Men” it was, because the pioneers of the oil sands were mostlymen. Creatures of their time, McKenzie-Brown places them in context. They formed a fraternity of explorers with a common vision. Again and again in Bitumen, we find men with similar upbringing and experience picking up the challenge and carrying it a few steps forward. Everyone is different, and yet they feel animated by the same spirit. The characters form a type; for example, the inventor with an idea and strong convictions, the corporate executive with a vision and ego to match.

McKenzie-Brown treads a narrow line. His is not a history in which he elevates a thread or chief actor for close study, setting the remainder into the dark curtains at stage-rear. This is a Chinese scroll or panorama, best read in multiple sittings. Moreover, McKenzie-Brown doesn’t promote a positive or negative view of the destiny of the oil sands. Whatever may be its future, the fact remains that the oil sands absorbed the dreams of a host of North America’s energy giants. We aren’t yet ready to set them all in context, but when that day arrives, Bitumen will be a useful research tool as well as an object requiring explanation in itself.

I’ve just noticed that my copy of Bitumen rests against A Distant Mirror and the Structure of Science. Not uncomfortably.