Fort McMurray Alberta is the main district in the Municipality of Wood Buffalo in Canada. A city till 1995, Fort McMurray Alberta was merged with smaller Hamlets like Fort Chipewyan, Fort Mackay to form municipality of Wood Buffalo, Improvement District No. 18.
Its not only the oil sands that has made Fort Mc Murray the regional hub for the area. Count in tourism , location a sound financial and retail infrastructure . Thus a solid infrastructure was in place to support the oil patch that has grown along with the Syncrude tar sands reclamation projects.
The population of Fort McMurray Alberta is less than 65, 000 and is a multicultural community. Half of its population is made up by native Albertans while about 20% are settlers from Newfoundland and Labrador. The city is one of the major hubs in oil production and houses two of the largest oil sand mining organizations Suncor Energy and Syncrude.
You might reckon that being in such an isolated area with lots of undeveloped land around that housing is inexpensive. Reckon again its a boom town with boom town sky-high house prices and apartment rents. On top of that “everything has to be trucked in” so the cost of goods and everyday essentials such as groceries is relatively high as well – compared to the distant major center of Edmonton.
What can be best said about Fort McMurray . Its cold in the winter , winter is long and frigid and the area is isolated as well. Its only a small 400 ( 250 miles) from the most major metropolis of Edmonton – the 250 miles drive south.
The economy of Fort McMurray Alberta is largely based on the Athabasca Oil Sands and is considered a major oil production area. The Abasands Oil Company was the first to extract oil in 1930s from the oils sands of Fort McMurray Alberta using a process called “hot water extraction”. But the commercial production started only by 1967 with the opening of Fantastic Canadian Oil Sands and since then the district’s economy has skyrocketed.
Fort McMurray is Alberta’s new frontier. Its “gold” boom town so to speak based on the new black gold – oil that is relatively simple to extract and is profitable to process at today’s high crude oil prices. The economy and the growth of the whole industry and whole area depends to a fantastic extent on continued high oil crude oil prices. It is only profitable to extract the crude oil from the tar sands at a given crude oil price. A lot of energy , and water which is in small supply as well , in processing the crude from the oil sand base. New extraction processes could come into development and into play , which require less fuel to extract the crude oil. Other processes , techniques and procedures are being looked at , and are in the research phases to require less precious water in the extraction process and the whole manufacturing process and sequence. Only time will tell the long term viability of this special economy as a whole.