Bitumount in 1937

Tom Morimoto described the International Bitumen Company Ltd. separation plant as it was in 1937 in his book Breaking Trail:

The plant at Bitumount was a marvel of design. It looked like it had been built by Rube Goldberg, who was famous for his cartoons of complex arrangements of machinery that performed simple tasks. The motive power at the plant was the steam supplied by two wood-fueled, fifty horsepower Scotch Marine boilers situated outdoors. There was a plentiful supply of fuel, as there was an abundance of fire-killed spruce nearby. The only problem was the amount of work necessary to get it. It required a gang of men to cut wood in the bush, another gang to load it onto wagons, and teamsters to drive the horse-drawn vehicles to the plant site.

There, another gang had to saw it into cordwood lengths, using a gasoline-engine-driven power saw. Then, of course, the firemen had to feed the wood into the boiler furnaces. The boilers supplied steam, which powered a large steam engine that drove most of the separation machinery. Steam also supplied the power to reciprocating pumps for pumping the separated bitumen. Steam and hot water from the boilers were used in the separation process. Electrical power for lighting was obtained from a steam-driven electrical generator. The main steam engine drove a huge flywheel, about 10 to 12 feet (3 to 3.7 m) in diameter. To this flywheel were attached belts, which drove the machinery. There were belts going in all directions to drive various machines.

The process used by Bob Fitzsimmons to separate oil from the tar sand was a hot-water process similar to that developed by Dr. Karl Clark at the University of Alberta and to a later process used by Great Canadian Oil Sands and Syncrude. However, Fitzsimmons’ process was much “cruder.” The raw tar sand feed was conveyed by a scoop operated by a dragline, which was powered by a “donkey engine,” a wood-fired combination steam boiler and engine. The tar sand was dropped into a “grizzly,” which was essentially a coarse screen composed of iron bars to get rid of any rocks. The tar sand was then mixed with hot water and steam and sent to a mixer—a vessel with paddles—to mix the tar sand and water into a pulp.

This pulp was then fed by gravity into a separation tank, a steel tank approximately 8 m (25 ft.) in length, with a rotating spiral screw about 30 cm (12 in.) in diameter at its bottom. Hot water and steam were injected into the separation tank to supply heat and to separate the bitumen from the sand—the bitumen floating to the top and the cleaned sand sinking to the bottom to be removed by the rotating spiral screw. The bitumen was removed by paddles that continually scraped the surface of the tank, depositing the bitumen in a surge tank from which it was pumped to the refinery. All the moving parts in this system were powered by the belts and pulleys driven by the main flywheel.