In 1993, as Ralph Klein's newly appointed energy minister, Pat Nelson (she was known then as Pat Black) stepped into a mine shaft elevator that would take her deep into the bowels of the Athabasca oilsands. The cage door closed and her stomach tightened as the rickety contraption followed a string of lights down the hole through 140 metres of overburden, then 20 metres of oilsands pay zone and another 15 metres of limestone into a horseshoe-shaped cavern.
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