Alberta’s hydrocarbon deposits have been a mainstay of provincial economic development since the Second World War. When Imperial Oil struck oil near Leduc, Alberta in February 1947, it marked the beginning of a petroleum boom that rapidly transformed Alberta’s impoverished agricultural economy and drew thousands of people to the province. As demand for oil grew, the oil industry and the Alberta government began producing synthetic oil from the vast bitumen deposits in the Athabasca region. The Alberta bitumen deposits are fine-grained sands, which hold up to eighteen per cent bitumen, a heavy and viscous hydrocarbon mixture. The largest of these, the Athabasca deposit, covers 50,000 square kilometers of north-eastern Alberta (Figure 1). The Athabasca deposit occurs in the McMurray formation, a stratigraphic unit of the Early Cretaceous Mannville Group of the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin. The Athabasca bitumen deposits dwarf Alberta’s conventional oil deposits, but difficulties with mining and upgrading bitumen into synthetic crude oil prevented the commercial production of bitumen before the 1960s. In 1958 Sun Oil entered an agreement with Great Canadian Oil Sands Limited (GCOS) to finance a bitumen extraction plant. The Alberta government approved GCOS in 1962, construction started in 1964, and the 45,000 barrels per day (bpd) plant opened in 1967. In 1966, as construction progressed on GCOS, Cities Service, Imperial Oil, Royalite, and Atlantic Richfield Canada formed the Syncrude consortium and began planning a second plant. Responding to pressure from industry, and from modernist aspirations, governments in the 20 century ultimately prioritized resource extraction, technological development, and economic growth above associated costs and consequences.

中文翻译：

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利益冲突：1970-1980 年阿尔伯塔油砂行业的发展政治和环境法规

自第二次世界大战以来，艾伯塔省的碳氢化合物矿床一直是省级经济发展的支柱。1947 年 2 月，Imperial Oil 在艾伯塔省勒杜克附近开采石油，标志着石油繁荣的开始，迅速改变了艾伯塔省贫困的农业经济，并吸引了成千上万的人来到该省。随着石油需求的增长，石油工业和艾伯塔省政府开始从阿萨巴斯卡地区的大量沥青矿床中生产合成油。艾伯塔省的沥青矿床是细粒砂，其中含有高达 18% 的沥青，这是一种重而粘稠的碳氢化合物混合物。其中最大的一个是阿萨巴斯卡矿床，占地 50,000 平方公里，位于艾伯塔省东北部（图 1）。Athabasca 矿床发生在 McMurray 地层中，加拿大西部沉积盆地早白垩世曼维尔群的一个地层单元。阿萨巴斯卡沥青矿床使艾伯塔省的常规石油矿床相形见绌，但在 1960 年代之前，开采和将沥青升级为合成原油的困难阻碍了沥青的商业生产。1958 年，Sun Oil 与 Great Canadian Oil Sands Limited (GCOS) 达成协议，为一家沥青提取厂提供资金。阿尔伯塔省政府于 1962 年批准了 GCOS，1964 年开始建设，45,000 桶/日 (bpd) 工厂于 1967 年开业。 1966 年，随着 GCOS、城市服务、帝国石油、Royalite 和大西洋富田加拿大的建设进展，形成了Syncrude 财团并开始规划第二个工厂。应对来自工业和现代主义抱负的压力，