Alberta Originals, Stories of Albertans Who Made a Difference, by best-selling author Brian Brennan, is a collection of profiles published by Fifth House. Business Edge is running a selection of profiles of interest to business readers. This week, we feature a familiar name in the oilpatch.
KARL CLARK, oilsands scientist, 1888-1966
The Athabasca oilsands of northern Alberta play a significant role in Canada’s petroleum industry. They supply 12 per cent of the country’s entire crude oil requirements, and, as other conventional sources of oil and gas dry up, they provide Canada with an enviable protection against possible petroleum shortages in the future.
Close to 50 years of research and development took place before the oilsands became a commercially viable source of energy for Canada. Many people were involved in this work, but the person who made the biggest contribution was undoubtedly Karl Clark.
Clark was an Ontario-born research chemist with the federal mines department who, during a field trip to Western Canada shortly after the First World War, saw the oilsands as a possible solution to road problems common in the Prairies in wet weather.
Clark noted that in dry weather the clay used for road building throughout the Western provinces was almost as good as concrete. But, when it rained, the clay absorbed the water and swelled up, turning the unpaved roads into quagmires. Vehicles either slid off the road or became hopelessly bogged in ruts.
Clark reasoned that waterproofing the roads with oil was the answer. Oil was a natural water repellent and perhaps the Athabasca sands could be used as this source of oil.
Finding a way to separate the oil from the sands thus became his life’s work. “Once the tar sticks to your boots, you can never get it off,” said Clark.
The son of a languages professor at McMaster University, then located in Toronto, young Karl was an indifferent student in high school and seriously considered dropping out and getting a job. However, his father would not hear of this and insisted that Karl remain in school.
Because chemistry was the one subject he did enjoy, Karl decided to focus on this at university. He continued his studies, going so far as to earn a PhD in chemistry at the University of Illinois.
After being rejected for military service in the First World War because of poor eyesight, Clark accepted a position with the Geological Survey of Canada, analysing and classifying soils taken from different parts of Canada where roads were to be built.
As an additional scientific assignment he was asked to provide a critical review of a 1917 research study done by the federal mines branch on the proposed commercial development of what were then known variously as the “bituminous sands” or the “tar sands” of northern Alberta.
Clark declared the research to be inconclusive and muddled, and he began to see this as an area where he might make a contribution. By 1920, he had discovered a possible method of separating oil from the sand through the use of a chemical additive.
The University of Alberta provided Clark with the means to continue experimenting with ways to separate the oil from the Athabasca sands, after the federal mines department shut down the experimentation for unspecified reasons.
Henry Marshall Tory, founder of the University of Alberta, was a champion of resource development and he saw the university as serving the province’s industrial needs in a practical way as well as being a teaching institution.
University scientists were already applying their expertise to the operation of farming and coal mining in Alberta. Investigating the potential of the oilsands was an enticing prospect because, among other things, it might eventually lead to the establishment of a chemical industry, as had happened with coal tar in Europe during the second half of the 19th century.
Tory offered Clark a position at the University of Alberta after he heard that Clark had achieved some success extracting oil from the sands. Clark accepted the position and in September 1920, accompanied by his wife and infant daughter, he came to work at what is now the Alberta Research Council.
To facilitate Clark’s work, Tory had six tons of oilsands transported from the Athabasca region and stockpiled on campus next to Clark’s laboratory. By early 1921, Clark had developed a crude version of the hot-water method still used today for oilsands extraction. He used the family washing machine as part of his experimentation.
Clark’s next step was to move the separation process from the lab to an experimental plant capable of batch operation. With his lab assistant, Sidney Blair, he designed and built a plant in the basement of the University of Alberta’s mechanical building.
It worked very well, and its success provided the impetus for Clark and Blair to design a larger plant to demonstrate the process as a semi-commercial, semi-continuous operation. The plant, built on the northern outskirts of Edmonton in 1924, didn’t work well at first. However, after extensive modifications by Clark, it improved, and by 1925 it was being hailed across North America as the first continuous plant for bituminous sands ever built and operated.
The following year, Clark and Blair published a major report on their work, concluding that the ultimate use of tar sand oil would be as a feedstock for oil refineries.
In 1930, the work moved closer to the source of the raw material with the opening of the Clearwater separation plant on a tributary of the Athabasca River, near the town of Fort McMurray.
It operated well but inconsistently, and it took Clark two years to achieve more uniformity in the separation results.
By then the Great Depression had hit Alberta with a vengeance, and all the money for oilsands research had dried up. As Clark noted afterward, the fundamental research questions had been answered. The next step was to turn the fruits of the experiments into commercial development.
It took another 37 years before large-scale commercial development became a reality. There were a few small-scale attempts but they struggled with scant success, largely due to underfunding.
Clark stepped away from oilsands research and retrained as a metallurgist. Blair moved to Chicago to work for Universal Oil Products.
However, with the re-establishment of the research council in 1942, Clark was able to return to oilsands research.
He started investigating such questions as how to make the heavy tar sand oil fluid enough to pass along transmission lines and how to extract the oil from sands located too deep beneath the surface for conventional strip mining.
During the late 1940s, Clark served as technical consultant for the provincial government’s Bitumount project, located 60 miles downstream from Fort McMurray, a pilot plant built to experiment with a cold-water separation process. Shortly after it opened, the government commissioned Clark’s former associate Sidney Blair to make a comprehensive study of the costs involved in extracting and transporting oil from the sands to refineries in southern Ontario.
Blair concluded, after a year of study, that progress with this immense oil deposit in northern Alberta was “entering the stage of possible commercial development.”
That report, released in 1950, is said to have spawned the commercial industry that exists today.
Clark retired in 1954, when he turned 65, but he continued his association with the Alberta Research Council in a part-time capacity for another nine years. By that time, plans for constructing the first large-scale commercial oilsands plant were well under way.
Between 1950 and 1965 Clark was much in demand as a mentor for the increasing numbers of graduate science students drawn to the new field of oilsands technology. He also served as an adviser to Great Canadian Oil Sands – now Suncor Energy – the company that was to bring his lifetime of research into large-scale commercial reality.
In 1965, Clark witnessed the turning of the first sod of the Great Canadian Oil Sands plant in Fort McMurray. He died of cancer in December 1966, just nine months before Premier Ernest Manning cut the ribbon to open the big plant. By that time Clark was widely recognized within the petroleum industry as the developer of the hot-water process now used in different forms by Syncrude Canada and Suncor Energy.
But with the joy of success came sadness at seeing the landscape of his beloved Athabasca country scarred by strip mining. Clark confided to his daughter, shortly before his death, that he had no wish to ever return to the scene.
