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Dilbit

Dilbit is a syllabic abbreviation of ‘diluted bitumen.’

A syllabic abbreviation is one formed from initial syllables of several words, for example: Interpol for International police. SAs are usually written in lower case and are pronounced as words rather than letter by letter, like FBI.

In order to be pumpable, to be transported easily through pipelines, the sluggish, tarry bitumen must be diluted. The diluent is often naphtha in a blend of 50% bitumen and 50% naphtha. Other light hydrocarbons can act as diluents too.

Some northern refineries can’t process dilbit so it has to be altered or the diluted bitumen must be piped further south into the United States increasing the cost per barrel piped.

Massive volumes of local lake and river water are involved in recovering bitumen from oil sands, water that, once used, is so foully polluted it is useless and sits, overhung by sulphurous stench, in sluggish tailings ponds, never to be cleansed. Like toxic pox, these death ponds now speckle the ruptured flanks of northern Alberta. Yes, Alberta government regulations order that this poisoned water be restored to life, but, so far, over these leprous billows no bird flies.

When first I saw these septic meres, I remembered Grendel's mere, watery abode of the monster in “Beowulf.” Also back to mind came lines from Coleridge's “The Rime of The Ancient Mariner,” particularly the passage where the ship is hideously becalmed, wave-stayed by the curse of the slain albatross.

“Water, water, everywhere

And all the boards did shrink ;

Water, water, everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink.

 

The very deep did rot: O Christ!

That ever this should be!

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs

Upon the slimy sea.”

 

 

Alberta is the province so nobly led by Ed Stelmach, the born-again muffin who walks like a man. You remember Ed, don't you?

Hey, Ed, show us that trick where you swallow your tongue every time you spew a government lie!

Goofy was the only premier of a Canadian province who scurried away like a sneaky boy from the table recently in Vancouver when concerned leaders had convened to speak together about Canadian pollution problems.

I guess Ed was late for church.

Don't you just adore born-agains and their deep concern for our earthly home and their talk of “good Christian stewardship of the land.” Like the kind that Ed Stelmach delivers. What a short-sighted, hypocritical nincompoop!

Quite on a par with that other Albertan leading us into a lung-wilting, cancerous future, our eco-blind sneak of a prime minister, Stephen Harper.

Albertans have a chance on March 3, 2008, day of the next provincial election, to send Ed Stelmach back to the barn to wipe the cow shit off the shrine beside the milking machine. Do it. Send Ed home. Ed's a wash-out. Maybe some of his cows are tits-up already, victims of polluted air. But, Ed, we know you'll find some way to shepherd these god-given resources for the good of humanity second, and for the good of the Stelmachs first.

And God Said, “Let There Be Oil.”

Alberta crawls with religious nutbar sects: nude wheat worshippers, hosanna-whooping evangelicals with aluminum foil wrapped over their heads to block evil transmissions from the giant locusts who rule Mars; misogynist, kiddie-diddling psychos with forty wives all dressed in homespun and chained to the Franklin stove in the kitchen; fruitcake Protestant rightwingers who love to wag the finger of moral disapproval at the rest of Canada. These gibbering cross-clutchers are oblivious to the fact of Alberta tar sands extraction techniques spewing the most voluminous aerial pollution in the world, black tonnes of volant crud gumming God's clouds and tarring up young, once pink lungs.

“A couple of kids croak, their lungs fatally clotted by pollution? So what? We can always breed more from one of our forty wives. Hallelujah!”

I invite the few of these pious do-nothings who are still not utterly insane, to pay heed to words that accompany one of their own hymns:

“This is my Father's world,
and to my listening ears
all nature sings, and round me rings
the music of the spheres.
This is my Father's world:
I rest me in the thought
of rocks and trees, of skies and seas;
his hand the wonders wrought.

This is my Father's world,
the birds their carols raise,
the morning light, the lily white,
declare their maker's praise.
This is my Father's world:
he shines in all that's fair;
in the rustling grass I hear him pass;
he speaks to me everywhere.”

 

Crude. It's Just Crud with an “E”.

Oil sands are about 10% bitumen and 85% clay, sand, and rocks. To remove the bitumen from the sand, they wash it, using a water-based extraction process, which involves hot water, aeration, and allowing the bitumen particles to settle out. When the bitumen is all nice and clean, the water isn’t. Forever.

  

Synbit

Another piping mixture of bitumen is synbit, a 50/50 blend of bitumen and synthetic crude oil. Synthetic crude can be produced in Alberta. Wide refining capacity for synbit exists in Texas but not up north.

 

Bitumen

Bitumen is the gooey, sludgy, raw spew of the oil sands, the heavy low-grade oil remaining after onsite processing by rotation and steam in which sand, lithic debris, water, small amounts of heavy metals and other contaminants are removed.

The Word Bitumen

Its ultimate origin is disputed. But all agree bithumen was borrowed into Middle English from classical Latin bitumen which the Romans used to name a tarry pitch found in ancient Palestine and Babylon, being the Roman translation of a Greek word asphaltos from which English took asphalt.

Bitumen is an old Latin word and its prime root bitu- has cognates in many Indo-European languages like Sanskrit jatu ‘gum’ or ‘resin’, Welsh bedw ‘birch tree’ from the fact that birch resin once had uses like tar, Middle Irish bethe or beithe ‘boxtree’, Old Norse kvatha ‘resin’ and Old High German kuti ‘glue.’ And, surprisingly, Old English words like cwidu, cwudu and cudu which developed into the modern English word for something gummy that cows rechew, namely, their cud.

 

Oil-Sand Statistics

“Most of the oil sands of Canada are located in three major deposits in northern Alberta. These are the Athabasca-Wabiskaw oil sands of north northeastern Alberta, the Cold Lake deposits of east northeastern Alberta, and the Peace River deposits of northwestern Alberta. Between them they cover over 140,000 square kilometres (54,000 sq mi) - an area larger than England - and hold proven reserves of 175,000,000,000 barrels (28 gigatonnes) of extremely heavy crude oil, which amounts to three-quarters of North American petroleum reserves. In addition to the Alberta deposits, there are major oil sands deposits on Melville Island in the Canadian Arctic islands which are unlikely to see commercial production in the foreseeable future.” (quoted from Wikipedia)

 

 

Overburden: Sneaky Euphemism Used by Oil Sands Companies

Through immemorial centuries, aboriginal peoples used surface tar to caulk their canoes. In 1715 a Captain Swan, a Cree, explored Alberta for the Hudson Bay Company and discovered the Athabasca Tar Sands. He brought back a sample of the ‘brimstone oil’ to the Hudson’s Bay Trading Post at York Factory. 

Surface stripping means the removal of overburden to expose bedrock or other material such as tar sands. Overburden is the biomass of living things plus rock and soil components that sit above oil sand deposits. Of what does overburden consist? Birds’ nests, burrows of animals, sparse soil of millennial accumulation, tree seedlings, animal and bird-sheltering native shrubs….hey, it’s all overburden to be scraped off the surface of the earth without a thought about tomorrow.

All that crap doesn’t matter because we gotta keep buying and driving those highly efficient Chevs, pardners.

Open-pit mining is used to extract some oil sands which are buried under about 25 metres of overburden. The overburden above the Fort McMurray oil sands is made of Cretaceous silts, clays and shales, some 65 to 140 million years old and younger (one million years old) gravels and sands. Life-supporting muskeg must be drained off about 40% of the oil-sand lands. All trees are destroyed.

 

the largest earth-mover ever built on earth

 

 

Four Alberta Place Names:

Hairy Hill, Wabiskaw, Athabasca & Bluesky

 

Hairy Hill, Alberta

It’s a town name that recalls the vast herds of buffalo that once roamed the softly undulant prairies of Alberta. Buffalo stopped at the place that came to be called Hairy Hill to scratch their hides on the rocks. The buffalo were rubbing ticks and fleas off their shaggy coats by scratching themselves on the many thorn bushes that grew abundantly in the vicinity. Settlers happened upon hairy thorn bushes and for a moment imagined in error that they had discovered a new species of shrub! But watching a buffalo have a good scratch, all soon became clear, and an Alberta place name was born.

Wabiskaw or Wabasca

Wabiskaw = wab- Cree ‘white’ + askaw Cree ‘grass,’ ‘meadow of grasses’

One Cree Elder suggested the place name is a poetic description of whitecaps on Lake Athabasca or on the Athabasca River. But how about cattails after they pop in the fall and explode with white puffy fluff? Both could be called ‘white grass.’

 

Athabasca

The toponym (place name) and the ethnonym (people’s name) contain the same Cree root for ‘grass’ as Wabiskaw or Wabasca.

The following etymology is my suggestion alone.

Athabasca = Cree *ota- ‘pull out of water’ + p (infix suggesting abundance)+ askaw ‘grass’

Thus the meaning of Athabasca contains a good aboriginal definition of reed ‘grass we pull out of the water’ and hence a place abounding in (+ Cree p) reeds, as at the mouth of the Athabasca River.

 

Bluesky, Alberta

My favorite Alberta place name is a wee whistlestop on Highway 2 just east of Fairview, west of Peace River, northwest of Edmonton, the name given first to a post office opened in 1914 by Adam and Sarah Dodge, early settlers.

I had the good luck to come upon Bluesky on a fair summer day many years ago. The little place lay curled in the sun, panting like an old dog come home after a trot. Above the hamlet arched a dome of moonroad and starpath, the mild blue yonder, a prairie canopy spun of sun threads in a sky of noon-blue cloth. Had I suffered sun stroke, or was I perhaps victim of a dread CVSA? Cerebrovascular Sentimental Accident. Right there outside Bluesky, a poem memorized at school had suddenly popped back into my head. I stopped the car, stood on the roadside and said aloud these lines by Edna St. Vincent Millay from her 1917 poem “Renascence.”

The world stands out on either side

No wider than the heart is wide;

Above the world is stretched the sky,—

No higher than the soul is high.

Had I been overheard, I would have been branded a nutty easterner. Never mind. That poetic moment was long before true prosperity arrived in Bluesky. To check that out, visit the website of the BLUESKY OIL SANDS PROJECT.