Well-Oiled Machine. By Erik Heinrich, Time, June 3, 2008. "'We move enough dirt to fill the SkyDome in 48 hours,' says Crisby, a fiftyish manager at Syncrude Canada Ltd., a company that is the Incredible Hulk of North America's biggest and richest resource deposit: Alberta's oil sands... Production in Alberta's oil sands will more than quadruple, to about 5 million [barrels] daily, by 2015; Canada currently exports an average of 1.9 million [barrels] daily (from all sources) to the U.S., more than any country, including Saudi Arabia. That's about 20% of total U.S. imports... And you have ExxonMobil to thank (or blame) for it. The U.S. giant got hammered by investors following its first-quarter earnings report. Profits were $13 billion, but production was falling. Yet in Canada, Exxon has muscled aside some of its Syncrude partners and parachuted in a new management team to meet aggressive expansion targets. 'Everything up here is American, pretty much,' says an oil worker earning $130,000 a year, a fairly typical salary in Fort McMurray, which has earned the nickname Fort McMoney because it has the nation's highest average income." [Editor's note: This Time article was referred to in a Grist piece we carried in our June 1, 2008 edition.]
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