Yesterday’s Oil Sands: Alberta’s first oil sands plant

Some 89 kilometers north of Fort McMurray, on the east bank of the Athabasca River, a clutch of derelict buildings and oil drums dating back to the 1920s stand as a reminder of the first commercial attempts to extract oil from sand.

Parks Canada added Bitumount to the registry of historic Canadian sites in 2006. In the 1920s and 1930s, University of Alberta researcher Karl Clark and the Alberta Research Council developed the “hot water method” to separate bitumen from the oil sands. The private entrepreneur R.C. Fitzsimmons built many of the facilities at Bitumount in the 1920s, including a plant that used Clark’s method. Bitumount counts as the first oil sands camp that included cabins, a long-house, a root cellar and latrines.

Fitzsimmons’s attempt to turn a profit on extracting, separating and refining bitumen proved a failure and in 1943 he sold his International Bitumen Company. In 1948 ownership was transferred to Alberta’s provincial government, which eventually abandoned it in the 1950s. The mine site, dump site, accommodations and processing sites sit not far from several of today’s oil sands mines.