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Alberta’s vast oil sands reserves can appear to be a simple geological fact: an enormous petroleum resource happened to lie beneath northern Alberta, companies developed the technology to extract it, and one of the world’s largest oil industries followed.
The history is much more complicated.
In his new book, Landlocked: Water, Energy, and Planetary Politics in Alberta, scholar Jeremy Schmidt argues that Alberta’s modern energy economy emerged from a much longer interaction between geology, water, scientific knowledge and government institutions.
The distinction matters because a natural resource does not automatically become an economically useful reserve.
Bitumen existed in northern Alberta long before financial institutions, governments and oil companies could treat it as commercially recoverable petroleum. Schmidt argues that decades of state-funded science and technological development helped make that transformation possible.
Alberta scientists methodically mapped and studied the province’s geology. Governments supported research into extraction technologies. Eventually the resource could be quantified, financed and developed on an industrial scale.
“Historically, the focus has been on supply,” Schmidt said during an Energi Talks interview.
That history challenges the popular assumption that Alberta’s petroleum economy is primarily the product of private entrepreneurship. Private capital was obviously essential, but the state helped create the scientific and technological conditions that made large-scale development possible.
Schmidt uses the term “landlocked thought” to describe the deeper consequence. Alberta is geographically landlocked, but Schmidt argues societies can also become locked into particular relationships with land. Scientific institutions, government agencies, investment patterns and political assumptions develop around those relationships and can persist long after the original circumstances change.
Water was part of the energy story from the beginning
Schmidt deliberately treats water and energy as one interconnected history.
Early agricultural settlement required irrigation. Governments developed institutions for allocating and managing water. Later, industrial energy production created new demands for the same resource.
Modern oil sands operations require water for extraction and processing. Conventional oil and gas production also affects groundwater and surface water through drilling, wastewater disposal and environmental liabilities.
Meanwhile, agriculture, cities, coal projects and emerging industries such as data centres compete for water.
Those pressures are becoming more significant as Western Canada’s hydrology changes. Schmidt expects a greater proportion of winter precipitation to fall as rain rather than snow. Less accumulated snow can mean reduced summer runoff and lower late-summer river flows — precisely when water demand can be highest.
The technical challenge is therefore becoming an allocation challenge. Who receives water, under what conditions and according to which priorities will increasingly shape Alberta development.
Water governance changed too
Schmidt’s history also examines how Alberta governs water.
Following major controversies such as the Oldman Dam dispute, local watershed and river groups emerged across the province. Many developed partnerships among municipalities, industry and civil society.
Later, Alberta incorporated some of those activities into formal watershed-management structures.
Schmidt argues that the change produced an unintended consequence. Once community organizations became incorporated into government policy frameworks, outside funders had less incentive to support them independently. Organizations increasingly depended upon government grants and contracts.
In Schmidt’s interpretation, that weakened an important source of independent civic participation in water management.
The issue matters because Alberta’s growing competition for water will require more, not less, public legitimacy.
Where do environmental numbers come from?
One of Schmidt’s most revealing examples comes from a 2013 bitumen release near Cold Lake.
Steam-based in-situ production caused bitumen emulsion to reach the surface at multiple locations. Experts agreed that the extraction technology initiated the event, but geoscientists disagreed over the precise underground mechanism.
That scientific dispute was highly technical. What happened at the surface was often much simpler.
Schmidt examined thousands of regulatory and company records describing the response. Workers attempting to determine the extent of contamination sometimes pushed wooden survey stakes into muskeg and checked them for visible oil.
The difficulty, Schmidt noted, is that groundwater in peatlands can be connected well below the depth reached by such a stake. Yet observations made during field work move through daily reports, company records and regulatory systems until they eventually become official data.
Another example involved vacuum trucks removing contaminated water. Schmidt found records in which estimates of the proportion of oil in the recovered material depended partly upon the judgment of the truck operator rather than precise measurement.
The lesson is broader than any single spill. Environmental and energy statistics often look definitive once published. Understanding how they were produced can be just as important as understanding the final number.
Alberta learned to think geologically
Schmidt’s argument is not that geological knowledge is unreliable. Quite the opposite.
Scientific knowledge helped Alberta accomplish something extraordinary: transform a difficult bitumen resource into one of the largest petroleum industries in the world.
But successful institutions also create habits. Alberta became exceptionally good at identifying resources, estimating reserves, solving extraction problems and increasing supply. That expertise helped shape how governments and industry approached energy development.
The emerging challenge is whether institutions designed around expanding extraction are equally good at asking different questions.
How much demand will exist decades from now? Which technologies could replace existing energy uses? How should scarce water be allocated? Which environmental liabilities are acceptable? What other industries could Alberta’s scientific and engineering capabilities support?
Those questions require more than geology.
Schmidt’s history suggests that understanding how Alberta learned to extract value from its land may also help explain why changing that relationship is so difficult.
And it suggests that Alberta’s next great technical challenge may not be finding another way to extract more resources. It may be learning how to value and use the resources it already has differently.
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