Great Canadian Oil Sands

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Great Canadian Oil Sands Limited was a Canadian heavy oil company that operated from 1953 to 1979. It built a large Athabasca oil sands plant to make synthetic crude and, when it opened on 30 September 1967, became the first company in the world to produce heavy oil commercially. In 1979, Sun merged its Canadian subsidiary with GCOS to form Suncor.

GCOS has roots dating back to the 1920s, when a group of New York policemen formed the Alcan Oil Company to lease land in Athabasca. After a series of changes and failed attempts to extract oil, the venture evolved into Oil Sands Limited, and in 1953 it was reorganised as Great Canadian Oil Sands Limited. In 1958 GCOS signed a contract giving Sun Oil a 75% royalty on production from a plant built on Sun’s leased land. GCOS received formal approval to construct the Athabasca plant in 1962, and Sun bought a majority stake in GCOS shortly after, paving the way for the plant’s construction and its 1967 opening.