Well-Oiled Machine

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And neither will Exxon. Down the road a few kilometers from Syncrude's Aurora mine, at the company's corporate headquarters, Tom Katinas has been shaking things up since he arrived from Exxon, based in Irving, Texas, in April 2007. "In the past, people came in at the bottom and worked their way to the top," says Katinas from his fourth-floor corner office, in a Sopranos-style drawl that reveals his Brooklyn roots. "There weren't enough new ideas."

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Oil in the Sand

The recently arrived president and ceo of Syncrude, along with a group of 25 handpicked Exxon executives, is sure to introduce plenty of change over the life of a 10-year service contract signed by their parent company. "Many Syncrude managers took a golden handshake rather than deal with Exxon," says a person familiar with the overhaul taking place.

Why is an American oil company, the biggest in the world, with annual revenue of $390 billion, calling the shots at Canada's biggest oil-sands producer? Syncrude, founded in 1964, when commercialization of the oil sands wasn't economically viable, epitomizes the tangled web of partnerships and deals that is Alberta's energy sector. The company has seven partners, but Syncrude's biggest shareholders are a pair of Calgary-based operators, Canadian Oil Sands Trust and Imperial Oil Ltd., which together own a 61.7% stake. It's through its controlling position in Imperial that Exxon has become master at Syncrude.

The planned expansion at Syncrude from 350,000 bbl. per day to 500,000 bbl. may have been too important for Exxon's future to leave to anyone but the A-team from Texas. "My job is to build a strong operational foundation," says Katinas, whose previous assignments have taken him to Saudi Arabia, Singapore and the U.K. In addition to Syncrude and Imperial, the biggest operators in the oil sands are Suncor Energy Inc., a Canadian-owned company, and Albian Sands Energy Inc., a joint venture of Shell, Chevron Corp. and Marathon Oil Corp. This tight clutch of companies accounts for 75% of all production in the oil sands.

And they all have their foot on the gas. At the Aurora North mine, a giant shovel fills up another 797B Caterpillar heavy hauler with a 400-ton load of material that--after being spun in what looks like the world's largest cement mixer to separate the bitumen from the sand--will eventually yield 200 bbl. of oil. "A year from now, that mountain won't be there," says Crisby, referring to the black wall of bitumen-rich soil gradually being demolished by shovel, dozer and a convoy of heavy haulers that operate around the clock.

The mega-projects across Alberta's oil sands rival some of humankind's greatest engineering achievements, including the pyramids of Giza and the Great Wall of China. After thousands of years, those ancient projects still bear witness to history. Conservative estimates predict the tar sands will give out in just 70 years. Their legacy to Canada is yet to be written, but it may be a great deal bigger than expectations. With new deposits still being found and technologies improving, the sands could produce for a couple of hundred years more. Forget Venezuela. Canada may become the new Saudi Arabia, the last great oil kingdom, right on the U.S. border.

Oil Sands For more images of Syncrude's Alberta operation, go to time.com/oilsands

The original version of this article misidentified Canada’s New Democratic Party as the National Democratic Party