Trudeau Bets $9 Billion on Plan to Clean Up World’s Dirtiest Oil

Canada is staking billions of dollars of public money on an oil industry plan to transform one of the world’s dirtiest crudes into one of the cleanest. But it’s relying on a technology with a checkered track record to prolong the life of a business critics say belongs in the history books.

The tar that infuses the sands in Canada’s remote northwest is so sticky the region’s indigenous people traditionally used it to waterproof their canoes. It wasn’t much use for anything else until the 1960s, when the oil company that became Suncor Energy Inc. found a way to refine the bitumen into ...