Oil and Holy Water

If, as Alberta premier Ernest Manning believed, the bitumen locked in the Athabasca oil sands was a gift from God, then God would find a way to get it out, using all the tools He had to hand. Hence Project Cauldron, the 1958 plan in which a nine-kiloton nuclear weapon would be detonated somewhere under Pony Creek, about 100 kilometres from Fort McMurray. What made production difficult at Athabasca, according to geologists, was the “natural viscosity of the oil which is hundreds of times greater than that of most other oils.” The heat and shock of a nuclear explosion would turn it to liquid, they figured, which could then be extracted by the usual means.

Manning liked the idea, but selling the plan to the public would require a different name, something “less effervescent,” less likely to terrify. Hence Project Oilsand. Spoiler alert: it never came to pass. Nonetheless, Project Oilsand remains as an instructive parable — of industry’s strange, mystical, and violent...