Albertans Are Stupid And Other Things That Make Them Canadian

PROLOGUE WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY In which an American discovers how to blast his way to paradise Manley L. Natland was sitting alone in the southern desert of Saudi Arabia when an extraordinary idea popped into his head. It was the end of a long day, and Natland was watching the sun set. Wrapped in thought and a Bedouin turban, the American geologist contemplated the climax to nature's magic hour. "It looked like a huge orange-red fireball sinking gradually into the earth," Natland later wrote in his diary. His mind wandered, and the display of the sun's explosion of light caused his thoughts to take a sinister and disturbing turn along the following lines: sun, heat, 15 million degrees Celsius, energy,thermonuclear weapons. And then the idea struck. Why not nuke Alberta? It was an odd, disjointed thought process. Yet there was an unmistakable logic to it. Natland at that moment was sitting on the biggest oil reserves on the planet. It was 1956 and the world was in fact swimming in oil. In Saudi Arabia alone, Natland's employer, the Richfield Oil Company of California, had all the oil they could ever dream of. All you had to do was sink a pipe; nature would do the rest. Yet Natland had become obsessed with a scientific challenge central to a place more than seven thousand kilometres away, in a remote area of Canada few people had even heard of: Alberta's vast oil sands in the Athabasca basin. This was a place where you didn't even have to look for the oilyou just reached down and picked up a handful of dirt and it was right there, black and tarlike, clinging to the grains of sand. But it was a treasure chest for which nobody had the key. For half a century a small group of scientists had tried to find a method of extracting the oil at a cheap price. Now Natland joined in the hunt. His solution was by far the most creativeand the most radical. Natland came down from the mountain and began to record his epiphany. He pulled his everpresent notebook out of his pocket and quickly set to work outlining the basics of his nuclear brainwave. He figured a 9-kiloton bomb, what he referred to as a "thermal device," would do the trick. Hiroshima's "Little Boy," dropped on Japan only eleven years earlier, had a yield equivalent to 13 kilotons of TNT; "Fat Boy," which was dropped on Nagasaki, yielded about 20 kilotons. So a 9-kiloton bomb, he thought, would be a good start. Bigger bombs could be employed later. Natland imagined bombs as big as 100 kilotons. The size would depend on the proximity of towns and cities, and the effects of the bomb's resultant seismic shocks on human structures. But for now, 9 kilotons would be good enough. Natland drew up a plan of action. Bombs would be inserted into boreholes 1,300 feet (396 metres) deep and about 100 feet (30 metres) into what geologists call the Beaverhill Lake Formation of silty limestone, which runs to depths of 600 metres beneath the Athabasca oil sands. The bombs' massive shock energy as well as the extreme heat would crush and melt the limestone rock, creating a giant underground cavity about 230 feet (71 metres) in diameter, into which, he predicted, several million cubic feet of oil sands would collapse. Natland was confident that the intense thermal heat plus the highpressure shock waves would literally boil the oil out of the sands and greatly reduce its viscosity, allowing it to migrate into pools. Natland figured that each cavern could hold about two million barrels of oil, which is almost equivalent to Alberta's current daily production. With an estimated two trillion barrels deep underground and unreachable by known mining technologies, that woMarsden, William is the author of 'Albertans Are Stupid And Other Things That Make Them Canadian', published 2007 under ISBN 9780676979138 and ISBN 0676979130.