oil sands

Syncrude Canada is one of the leading players in the big, dirty business of extracting oil from the tar sands of northern Alberta. It is a joint venture owned by an investment trust and a group of six U.S., Canadian and Japanese oil companies, among them the Canadian subsidiary of ExxonMobil. The company has been targeted by environmental groups because of its large volume of greenhouse gas emissions, but Syncrude has experienced a higher degree of controversy over an incident in 2008 in which some 1,600 ducks were killed at one of the company waste ponds.

Production at Canada’s largest petroleum company is dominated by the highly controversial process of extracting crude oil from the tar sands of northern Alberta. Suncor has invested billions of dollars—and plans to invest many billions more—to make North America more energy independent, but uses methods that generate large quantities of the greenhouse gases responsible for global warming. Suncor, which in 2009 swallowed its competitor Petro-Canada, says it is trying to reduce those emissions, but the company is still a target of frequent climate protests by groups such as Greenpeace.

Marathon, founded as the Ohio Oil Company, has gone through several incarnations over the decades. For a while it was taken over by the Standard Oil Trust, later it was acquired by U.S. Steel, and still later its refining and marketing operations were for a time part of a joint venture with Ashland Oil. Today Marathon is independent and is among the mid-sized oil majors based in the United States. The company has faced controversy in connection with the air pollution caused by its U.S.