Oil Sands

These silo looking things all over Cold Lake (and down at least to Bonnyville as flingy-lingy finally guessed are part of the oil industry.

Imperial Oil (2/3rd's owned by Exxon-Mobile) runs several projects getting oil from the oil sands in Alberta. Its biggest project is the Cold Lake in-situ field where they get the oil out by injecting stem into the ground and extracting the oil underneath.

Canada's oil sands reserves are said to be greater than the entire rest of the world's petroleum reserves combined.

These "wells" are all over. The oil company gets the mineral rights from the provincial government (the landowners only own the first 1 foot of dirt under their property unless they owned it before Alberta became a province in 1907), and only have to pay the farmers the value of the land they are occupying (in other words the annual value of the amount of say wheat that could have been grown on the area the oil well is taking up), although the farmer does not have to sell. If he doesn't they buy land from his neighbor near his fence and just drill at an angle.

Because of the explosive growth of the oil patch in the last few years, salaries are out of sight in the area, home prices are going through the roof and 21 year old mechanics with Royal Canadian Air Force training are leaving the service when they get to Cold Lake to work the oil patch making $150,000 a year (Canadian). It is also why the Edmonton Journal help wanted classifieds are full of quarter page ads from cover to cover begging for workers. Not just in the oil industry, either, because everyone went to work oil there are no craftsmen or service people to be found. This was a major reason we couldn't find anyone to tow us out of the snow, all mechanics and drivers work for the oil industry and none of them work in service stations or drive tow trucks commercially anymore.

See what you can learn waiting for a tractor to pull you out of the snow?!