Against the Odds.
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Images from the Book
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Sample from the Audiobook
Buy the Audiobook: On Audible, on Kobo
From Chapter 9, "A Winter Warning" by Drew Ann Wake.
Narrated by Lorene Shyba
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An Excerpt from the Book
From Chapter 4: The Caveat Challenge
By Drew Ann Wake
In 1956, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent made a wry comment on the Canadian government’s lack of interest in the North. “Apparently,” he said, “we have administered these vast territories in an almost continuing state of absence of mind.” That was to change in the era from 1968-78.
With the discovery of oil in the Arctic, both government and industry focused their attention on drawing the Northern territories into the fold. One initiative, the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, was to play a fundamental role in transforming the North from a neglected hinterland to the centre of Canada’s economic plan for the future.
Oil in Alaska
Just before Christmas in 1967, petroleum geologist Tom Marshall boarded a plane that would take him from Fairbanks, across the Alaskan tundra to a remote location on Prudhoe Bay. For years, Marshall had been promoting the hypothesis that the frozen plain between the Brooks Range and the Arctic Ocean covered a massive reserve of oil and natural gas. But time and again, test wells had come up dry. Now only one oil rig remained in that remote region, drilling the last test well at Prudhoe Bay before the industry moved to locations with greater promise.
Marshall remained optimistic, but he knew that he was the butt of jokes. It had taken years to persuade Alaska’s first Governor, Bill Egan, that the state should stake its claim to the remote region. “Doesn’t he know it’s frozen?” the Governor asked. One of Marshall’s colleagues had even scrawled “Marshall’s Folly” in large letters across an office map of Prudhoe Bay.
But in the winter of 1967, when the drilling crew opened a valve to test the well, a torrent of natural gas burst from the pipe. When it was lit, a fiery needle of flame shot into the air.
It was the first well in what would become the largest oilfield in North America. In Anchorage, oil industry executives began to grapple with the challenge of moving the oil from its remote location on the Arctic coast to the southern United States. The major oil companies, BP, ARCO, and Exxon, developed a proposal for a 800-mile pipeline that would carry oil from Prudhoe Bay across Alaska to the port at Valdez, where it could be loaded onto tankers for the journey south.
But what could be done about the natural gas that surged out of the remote wells? Although it was possible to liquify natural gas and send it by tanker to West Coast ports, the natural gas would still be distant from its principal markets in the US mid-west. So the oil companies proposed a pipeline that would carry natural gas across the north coast of Alaska and the Yukon to the Mackenzie Delta in the Northwest Territories. If more reserves were discovered in the delta, Canadian natural gas might augment the supply. From there, the pipeline would turn southward, travelling along the Mackenzie Valley until it merged with the pipeline network in Alberta, which had been carrying oil to the central United States for decades.
The plan seemed straightforward. Little did they know.