Total output from the oil sands is expected to triple by 2020 to 3.5 million barrels of oil per day. Falling energy prices have made oil companies delay some projects, but most analysts still expect formidable growth in the long term.
"The oil sands have become a strategic resource for the whole world," said Don Thompson, head of the Oil Sands Developers Group. "All of a sudden, the spotlight is shining on us big time."
Boreal boomtown
That spotlight has drawn thousands of workers to Fort McMurray, a former fur-trading post that has seen its population nearly double in a decade to 65,000. Thousands more live in temporary camps near the oil sands.
Most come from Canada's eastern provinces, but there are also Venezuelan petrochemists, Filipino hotel workers and South African doctors.
Theresa Ballard, a former hair stylist from Newfoundland who became a truck driver at Albian Sands, complains that the place has grown so rapidly that "there's no breathing space."
Demand for labor remains so high that a recent Craigslist ad seeking dishwashers at a pizza parlor promised $14.20 an hour (Canadian), more than a starting mechanic at Boeing. Truck drivers and oil-sands workers earn well into the six figures.
Every day, Shell flies a Boeing 727 into the company's private airstrip to rotate crews of workers from impoverished regions in Atlantic Canada.
Two-lane Highway 63, which connects Fort McMurray's residential areas to the oil-sands developments, is jammed at rush hour with pickup trucks. Mobile homes can sell for $400,000, while fancier houses sell for more than $600,000, among the highest home prices in Canada.
More than 2,000 residences are under construction.
The runaway growth and profusion of highly paid single men have given Fort McMurray a Wild West reputation as a land of easy money, drug abuse and prostitution. The city also has one of Canada's highest homelessness rates.
In their stark combination of opportunity and grit, "all oil towns are pretty similar," Pedro Mujica said.
He and his wife, MarifeValderrama, worked for Venezuela's state oil company but fled for political reasons and now work at different oil-sands operations. Politically, it's a lot calmer in Fort McMurray and there's less crime.
Life here "is a lot better," Valderrama said.
On weeknights, she gives dance lessons and leads salsa workouts at a fancy community center sponsored by oil money -- a way of sharing her family's Caribbean heritage with their new neighbors.
Fort McMurray's good fortunes, however, have been accompanied by huge emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. In the long term, this could prove costly.
Climate concerns
At Syncrude, Canada's largest single source of petroleum, the gleaming metallic skyline of the upgrader facility stands in harsh contrast to the brown and yellow autumn hues of the surrounding forest -- a small city of towering vats, pressure cookers and the largest tower crane in the world, crowned by an immense plume of white vapor.
The plant also is Canada's third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, according to the Pembina Institute.
Most of the emissions come from heating the bitumen oil to remove sulfur and from producing hydrogen that is later combined with bitumen to form light, so-called "sweet" crude.
Along with the mining, there are drilling operations where oil producers extract bitumen after heating it underground. That method burns natural gas -- a relatively clean source of energy that could be used elsewhere.
The potential climate impact of the greenhouse gases has some asking whether the oil-sands crude is a good environmental bargain.
Oil sands "are delaying the inevitable shift that has to come," said Pembina's Dyer. "Do we want to get on this trajectory, or do we want to use this as a pretty clear signal that we've run out of easy oil and we need to start thinking about nonfossil-fuel alternatives?"
Oil companies and Alberta energy authorities downplay the fact that producing oil here results in three times more emissions than conventional drilling elsewhere. They say the oil sands account for less than 4 percent of Canada's total emissions and about 0.1 percent of global greenhouse gases.
They also say piping a barrel of oil to the U.S. from Alberta is cleaner than shipping it from the Persian Gulf. Traditional drilling also is becoming dirtier as the world runs out of light, easy-to-extract crude, so the carbon-footprint gap between conventional oil and oil-sands crude is narrowing.
Industry officials pass the buck to consumers, too, saying no matter how much carbon is emitted in producing oil, it's vehicle exhaust pipes that pump out more than 70 percent of the greenhouse-gas emissions from petroleum fuels.
Still, oil-sands producers are scrambling to quell the greenhouse-gas concerns by investing heavily in experimental methods to capture the carbon-dioxide emissions and inject them deep underground.
