Norman Wells: The Past and Future Boom

Norman Wells: The Past andFuture Boom R. J. D. PAGE In August 1981 the Government of Canada announced approval of the $600 million expansion of the Norman Wells oilfield and the companion $400 million Interprovincial (NW) Pipeline south to Zama Lake in Alberta, the terminus of the existing pipeline grid. This decision will open a new chapter in the long and tangled history of Norman Wells and the petroleum industry in the western Arctic. Now the field fs on the ·verge of the greatest expansion in its history which may open the way for further pipelines and a Mackenzie Valley energy corridor to the Beaufort Sea. But the whole exercise raises a great many questions about the process of decision-making and the priorities which southern Canada wishes to jmpose on the North. This region has always been an imperial hinterland subject to southern economic forces involved with staples exploitation from furs to oil. The North has played a substantial role in the romantic mythology of the Canadian identity as a hardy, intrepid northern nation. It has al~o aroused our sense of greed. In the South it has been viewed as a resource treasure chest for the future prosperity of the nation as a whole. In the 1890s it was the gold rush in the Yukon; today it is petroleum and minerals which bring men north. Most Canadians are familiar with the Yukon gold rush of the 1890s but few writers have ever mentioned that the hopes of an oil bonanza in the North predate the discoveries on the Klondike. The first white fur traders into the NorthWest nearly two centuries ago were shown seepages of oil along the banks of the Mackenzie and the Athabaska by their native guides. In the years following Confederation, these petroleum springs were investigated by the Geological Survey of Canada at the very time that the oilfields of western Ontario were rapidly declining. However, public awareness of the importance of the oil industry was steadily rising thanks to 16 Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Trust. In Ottawa in 1888 a Special Senate Committee investigated the ''Great Mackenzie Basin'' and reported the existence of ''the most extensive petroleum field in America, if not the world." As it would become one of the chief assets of the Dominion, the committee recommended that the central area of 40,000 square miles (now the tar sands) be excluded from public sale and retained as a crown preserve. Thus the concept of public ownership was not confined to our own age. The Senators heard evidence that this huge new oilfield could supply not only this continent, but Britain as well, through one of the northern ports like Churchill. The Edmonton Bulletin even went so far as to predict that the northern oilfields would prove more extensive than those of the rest of the world combined. With completion of a northern railway, Canada could export more oil than the United States or Czarist Russia. With Canada suffering through a prolonged depression, oil provided a powerful stimulus to the Canadian imagination irrespective .of any of the practical problems of recovery technology, transportation, or resource isolation. It was a full decade later, in 1898, before the first company applied to the Department of the Interior for an exploration permit at Norman Wells. In 1911, J.K. Cornwall of the Northern Trading Company sent samples of the Norman Wells seepages to Pittsburgh, where they were analysed and found to be similar in composition and quality to Pennsylvania oil. A Calgary syndicate appeared to be on the verge of exploratory drilling in 1914 when attention was distracted first by the Turner Valley oil strike in Alberta, and then by the outbreak of war in Europe. Following the war, Imperial Oil quietly purchased the drilling rights and, in the summer of 1919, sent a drilling crew north from the end of rail in Alberta. The party of eight men and an ox followed the arduous and winding river route north, barging and hauling their awkward equipment over a thousand miles. With rocky portages of up to sixteen miles in length and clouds of black flies, the trip was a considerable feat of endurance. Early...