From Narrative of Promise to Rhetoric of Sustainability: A Genealogy of Oil Sands

Since its conception, “oil sands” has been the name of a pro-development narrative seeking to convince skeptics that bitumen saturating the sandstone of Alberta’s Athabasca region ought to be extracted and chemically altered into Synthetic Crude Oil (SCO). Over the decades, the nature of skepticism has changed, and thus oil sands (along with its meanings and claims) has been continually reproduced so as to placate new criticisms. This paper offers a discursive genealogy of the oil sands narrative, demonstrating how it has been transformed from what was throughout the twentieth century a materially situated “narrative of promise” aiming to prove that SCO production was physically possible and that it could be commercially profitable, into what by 2015 was at its core a largely reactive “rhetoric of sustainability” aiming to convince a new class of critics that, contrary to their claims, SCO was in fact being produced in an environmentally responsible manner.