Paving

Using bitumen as a paving material is an idea whose origin lies in the distant past; the ancient Mesopotamians were paving the roads of Babylon with the substance as early as 625 BCE. Adapting Alberta’s resource for such projects was suggested by several early investigators of the oil sands, including Robert Bell, G. Christian Hoffmann, and Alfred von Hammerstein.

The most persistent attempts at using the oil sands as a commercial paving substance were led by Thomas Draper and Sidney Ells. Draper spent sixteen years mining oil sands for both his own McMurray Asphaltum & Oil Ltd., founded in 1922, and others as well. He earned contracts to pave roadways in Ottawa, Ontario, as well as in Medicine Hat, Vegreville and Edmonton in Alberta. His was the only commercial company whose activities were based predominantly on paving. Indeed, the name he gave his company suggests that Draper always had higher hopes for the paving possibilities than for the oil extraction experiments he also initially conducted.

Sidney Ells, the Mining Department engineer who devoted his career to the investigation of the oil sands, was also an early proponent for paving as the

most likely commercial application. After his initial foray into the Athabasca region, he reported that the paving substance

would find its chief market in the prairie provinces, where materials for permanent road construction are difficult to obtain. Modern civilization and every aspect of community life are so intimately dependent on the condition of our highways, that almost any method devised to measure the benefits of good roads is incomplete.

With millions of tons of paving material being imported from outside of Canada and Alberta’s desperate need for more roads, paving seemed the clear choice for a businessman seeking to capitalize on the oil sands. By 1920, seven years after Henry Ford’s assembly line had made automobiles widely available, cars were no longer a novel sight on Alberta’s roads. Between 1921 and 1930, the number of cars in Alberta increased from 40,000 to 100,000, and the proportion of rural car owners doubled. As the number of drivers increased, so, too, did the accidents, collisions and deaths, causing the demands for improved and increased roads and highways to escalate.

Over the course of two decades, Sidney Ells conducted multiple technical experiments in the use of oil sands for paving. In 1915, he used Athabasca asphalt to surface several sections of 82^nd Street in Edmonton. Despite heavy traffic, this road was reported by a city engineer to remain in good condition eleven years later. In 1927, Ells used 2,153 tonnes (2,373 tons) of oil sands to pave about 4 km (12,000 ft.) of highway and sidewalks at Jasper Park Lodge. One year later, the park’s resident engineer reported that the roadway had not only survived the winter in excellent condition, but even looked better than it had when first laid.

He concluded, “It is quite dustless, gives excellent trackage normally and also during wet weather, and there is no danger of skidding and side-slipping. In fact it seems to be the ideal road surfacing material.”

Ultimately, interest in using the oil sands in their natural state as a paving material waned, and experimenters had to concur with the conclusions previously drawn by Karl Clark. Despite the promising results of some early paving attempts, the character of the oil sands was too irregular and the cost of transporting the bulky substance from its remote source made using it as a paving resource simply impractical.