FORT McMURRAY, Canada -- In vast strip mines north of this Alberta boomtown,

bigger than five-story buildings rip out tar-soaked sand, dumping 400-ton loads in

that feed the voracious U.S. appetite for oil.

Factories in Canada's "

," site of the world's largest single oil deposit, use super-heated water to purify the rich black glop. Much of the petroleum is piped to U.S. refineries, making Canada -- not Saudi Arabia or Venezuela --

A century and a half into the petroleum age, oil companies have depleted many accessible, politically friendly reserves. Rising energy prices might be expected to encourage investment in solar, wind and other alternatives, and to some extent they do.

Yet if the $200 billion poured into the

so far is any indication, bigger money will flow worldwide to ever more expensive fossil fuels.

With that trend comes other costs. Mining and

active ingredient, uses more than seven times the energy it takes to make crude oil from conventional drilling. The process emits more than three times as much greenhouse gases as drilling and processing conventional petroleum, according to

, a research organization critical of the oil sands.

, the oil sands' largest producer of synthetic crude, are employing newer techniques and far more energy per barrel to tap reserves too deep to mine. They're using Canada's

, a clean-burning fuel, to steam out buried bitumen and make oil, a comparatively dirty fuel.

"It's like using champagne to make beer," says

, a member of the Lubicon Cree native tribe that has fought oil and gas development.

managers say oil is what U.S. customers demand for America's gasoline tanks. They say buying oil from Canada, a friendly, stable democracy, is far better than getting it from dictatorships overseas. They dispute critics' greenhouse-gas figures, saying oil-sands emissions are only

than those of average U.S.-refined crude when the entire fuel cycle is measured from extraction to combustion in motor vehicles.

Chevron Corp., ExxonMobil Corp. and the like have already picked the low-hanging fruit of world oil reserves. Now they must seek oil in increasingly remote and risky places such as deep in the Gulf of Mexico, where the offshore rig exploded in April, triggering BP's

Global energy demand will jump by about a third during the next 25 years, even if countries keep promises to cut greenhouse-gas emissions and phase out fossil-fuel subsidies, according to the

. Unconventional oil, led by the oil-sands and Venezuelan extra-heavy crude, will more than triple by 2035 to meet about 10 percent of world demand, the agency predicts.

will take ever more energy per barrel, pushing the world toward an energy-burning spiral in which more and more power must be used to procure a gallon of gas.

"Fifteen years ago the oil sands was a marginal resource," said

, a professor at Stanford University's department of energy resources engineering. "Now all the major oil companies are interested because it's hard to expand production elsewhere. It's not like the good old days when you go poke a hole in the ground and you're done."

The good news is that unconventional oil resources are enormous. The world could run for decades on Alberta bitumen, Venezuelan extra-heavy crude, Utah oil sands, Western oil shales and petroleum made from coal or natural gas.

The bad news is that all those methods are considerably more expensive than traditional oil drilling, and the reserves are often located in environmentally sensitive areas.

Alberta's oil deposits, formed from tiny creatures left by an ancient sea, cover an area more than half the size of Oregon. They contain perhaps

, equal to the entire world's remaining recoverable reserves of conventional oil.

But because of bitumen's gluey nature, it's difficult to extract. Only about

are considered recoverable with today's technology.

in Canada's oil patch already produce about

a day, more than Texas or Qatar. Production will triple if all proposed and announced projects are completed -- as they probably will be, given current oil prices at $87 a barrel, well above the threshold for profits.

Most motorists in the United States, which consumes more than 20 percent of the world's oil, have probably never heard of Alberta's oil sands. But the area northeast of Edmonton is famed across Canada for its growing wealth, as energy exports have increased to 6 percent of the Canadian economy.

Workers stream here from recession-battered regions of Canada and from the oil fields of Scotland, Venezuela and beyond. The arrivals brace for minus 35-degree winter temperatures and 13-hour shifts. They pay $1,800 a month for one-bedroom apartments. They often "hot sheet," sharing one bed between a day- and night-shift worker.

Bob Rozvelt, 44, arrived four years ago from Saskatchewan, a refugee from the ailing pulp-mill industry, pleased to start at $31 an hour for

Canada's biggest oil company.

where bitumen steeps in hot water, rising to the top of giant vats and separating into an acrid brew resembling liquid asphalt. He and his crew send the jet-black mix to an

plant that uses intense heat, pressure and water to convert it to synthetic crude.

, an oil town boasting nonstop flights from Houston, city managers struggle to keep up with a metro-area population that has soared past 100,000. Residents have Canada's highest incomes and pay an average of $670,000 for a single-family home.

"We've been blessed by the recession," said

, Fort McMurray's mayor. The slowdown over the past two years has allowed catch-up projects such as construction of a five-lane Athabasca River bridge to fight epic traffic jams during shift changes.

Community leaders speak proudly of the oil-sands industry, which employs 456,000 Canadians directly and indirectly. They praise the engineers who confounded skeptics to wring petroleum from sand. They decry "drive-by journalism" practiced by

magazine and other media that diss the oil projects.

Alberta officials and oil company executives say they're protecting the environment and

greenhouse-gas emissions. They say they're beginning to reclaim huge tailings ponds containing toxic liquids from bitumen processing -- recently filling and replanting the industry's first after 40 years of mining.

Critics dispute industry on every point. They say emissions are rising, not falling. They dismiss Suncor's tailings reclamation as a

, saying the company moved sludge elsewhere before dressing up the pond.

"It's a hostile environment for environmentalists, here in Alberta," said

, Sierra Club director in Edmonton.

Opponents and advocates can't even agree on what to call the area.

Environmentalists name it the "

," the title of a book by Calgary journalist Andrew Nikiforuk, who says calling bitumen oil is merely an attempt to sanitize carbon-laced gunk. "If that lazy reasoning made sense," Nikiforuk wrote, "Canadians would call every tomato ketchup and every tree lumber."

Industry leaders say the term tars the area's reputation. They call it the oil sands, the name used in conservative commentator Ezra Levant's book, "

Levant says the oil sands should be compared not to an impossible low-emission ideal but to America's other petroleum sources. "With few exceptions," Levant writes, "the other countries on the top-10 list are the world's dictatorships, human-rights abusers and warmongers."

, an aluminum-industry veteran who advises a company gasifying coal for oil-sands use, says the overriding issue is the large amount of energy required to extract and upgrade bitumen compared to the energy produced.

Years ago, conventional drillers needed to burn only one unit of energy to get 100 out, said Simon

, Pembina Institute policy director. In the oil sands, Dyer said, miners expend one unit of energy and get only 14 out.

Oil-sands companies that heat steam to melt bitumen deep underground burn one unit, he said, and get just four. Increased energy in, he said, means more greenhouse gases out.

Alberta officials say oil-sands greenhouse-gas emissions are just 5 percent of Canada's total. Since 1990, emissions -- per barrel -- have declined 39 percent, Canadian petroleum producers say. Dyer's institute responds that emissions -- in total -- have more than doubled since then, and could nearly triple by 2020.

To mine for petroleum, shovel machines working around the clock must remove two tons of overburden and two tons of oil sand for each barrel of bitumen produced. Mining is so abrasive that a shovel bucket's teeth, made by Portland's

wear out every two to three days.

For each bitumen barrel, mining companies use more than two barrels of water. Wastewater goes to

that cover 66 square miles and contain enough toxic liquid to fill Oswego Lake 76 times.

The oil-sands industry is spending billions on

to dry liquid waste faster. Syncrude deploys noise cannons, rafts and scarecrows to keep

Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach joined Suncor Chief Executive Rick George at the oil sands in September to unveil what they described as the industry's

. George said the energy required to remove 1.2 million cubic meters of topsoil, store it and return it boggled the imagination.

Workers planted 630,000 shrubs and trees at the site, which already attracts birds and deer. Here and there, dead upside-down trees poked from the landscape, placed in hopes of attracting raptors to protruding roots.

"What most industry detractors don't know is that the challenges around the oil fields always have been solved through innovation," Stelmach told the invited guests. "I gotta tell you, I am damn proud to be an Albertan."

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