February 26, 1999

Challenged by the oilsands

The thriving oilsands industry is Karl Clark's legacy

Karl Clark once remarked of the Athabasca Oil Sands, "They have been a taunt to North America for generations. They wear a smirk which seems to say, `When are you going to do something?'" After devoting his life to tapping this elusive resource, Clark died just nine months before commercial production on the sands began in 1967. While he devised his hot-water flotation process in the early 1920s, a modified version of it is still used today to separate oil from the sands at the world's largest single oil deposit.

Born in Georgetown, Ont. in 1888, Clark studied at McMaster University and the University of Illinois, graduating with a PhD in physical chemistry in 1915. He then took up research positions with the Geological Survey of Canada and the Bureau of Mines. Impressed with Clark's knowledge of tar sands, Henry Marshall Tory (the university's first president) hired him in 1920 as the first employee of a new research body, the precursor to the Alberta Research Council.

Clark's initial research was far removed from the concept of fuel, however. Having served as chief road materials engineer with the federal government, he knew the sands were an excellent material for paving roads. But the only way to transport and market the material successfully was to separate as much of the oil as possible from the bulky sands. Clark had some success with separation in his Ottawa lab using an emulsifying agent, but it was in the basement of the University of Alberta's power plant that he came up with the hot-water method still used in the petroleum industry.

The process itself seemed simple enough. It involved mixing a slurry of strip-mined, oil-bearing sand with steam and hot water and then skimming the bitumen tar off the top. It took several years, however, to develop and refine the process to successfully produce refinery-grade synthetic crude, and decades to convince industry mining the oils sands was an attractive venture.

Initially, the most daunting challenge for Clark was to reproduce his small experimental operation in a full-scale plant. Clark built one at the Dunvegan Yards on Edmonton's northern boundary, but his first attempts at oil recovery were a dismal failure. Although he and his assistants fed 100 tonnes of feed into the process, much of the oil failed to separate at all. Clark closed the plant and went back to the drawing board.

It didn't take him long to figure out what was wrong. After adjusting the amount of agitation in the mixing box and discovering weathered sands resisted separation, he opened the plant again in 1925. Shortly afterwards he sent 45 litres of his crude oil to the Universal Oil Products Company in Chicago for analysis. The company confirmed the oil was clean enough for refinement, and could be used to produce gasoline, fuel oils and kerosene.

Clark continued his research in two pilot plants sponsored by the provincial government, one built at Clearwater in 1930 and one at Bitamount in 1949. At Clearwater, Clark would make a crucial refinement to make separation easier - neutralizing the acidity of water mixed with raw sands.

The Bitamount experiment was to prove a milestone in oil-sands history. By 1950 it had clearly demonstrated Clark's process could produce clean oil. But potential investors were still wary of gambling on bitumen. In 1950, Clark's former colleague Sid Blair wrote a report for the Alberta government on the economic viability of the sands, concluding that a barrel of crude could be extracted from the sands, processed, and delivered to Ontario for $3.10. The market price per barrel then was $3.50. "The Blair Report," writes Clark's daughter Mary Sheppard in Oil Sands Scientist, "spawned the commercial industry as we know it today."

While exploiting the oil sands was a major preoccupation of Clark's career, he was also a gifted teacher. He joined the University of Alberta's Department of Mining and Metallurgy in 1938, and was head of the department from 1947 until his retirement in 1954. According to George Ford, his students "learned more than the technical aspects of metallurgy from him; they learned the wider significance of truth, responsibility and devotion to a cause."

Clark didn't live long enough to see the oil-sands industry flourish. When the Great Canadian Oil Sands plant opened in 1967 at a cost of $235 million, producing 45,000 barrels of synthetic crude per day, it was the first of its kind in the world. It later became the Suncor plant.

It is surely no stretch to say this thriving Alberta industry is Karl Clark's legacy, but he would never have said it himself. In fact he used to remark primitive methods for extracting oil from sands had been around for centuries - he merely helped move the process along. As an editor of New Trail once commented, "Dr. Clark is the first person we have met who could give any sensible account of the oil sands tangle, but he is modest enough to say nothing of his own important contributions to research in that field."

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