HISTORIC SOLUTION:
Why not look at a river as oilsands route?
Surrounded by wheat fields and towering mountains, Alberta nonetheless has a crucial link to the sea. By road it is farther away than Vancouver’s bustling docks, but the province does boast its own northern port which can handle seagoing traffic.
Long forgotten in the far northeastern corner, Fort Fitzgerald, population eight according to the 2010 census, was once bustling with boats and barges ferrying cargo up the mighty Slave River. It may boom again, and soon.
Alberta’s oilsands production is slated to increase over the next three years to three million barrels a day from about 1.7 million, forcing a need to diversify its market for bitumen beyond the U.S. Midwest. Asia is a key target.
But there’s also the question of how to move the product with two major pipeline projects mired in controversy.
Transcanada Corp.’s $13-billion Keystone XL proposed crude oil line from Hardisty in east-central Alberta to Nederland, Texas, was denied on Jan. 18 by the U.S. government. Closer to home, hearings have begun on Enbridge’s proposed $5.5-billion Northern Gateway pipeline across northern Alberta and B.C. With the hearings scheduled to last 18 months and massive opposition from many groups, its future is anything but certain.
A proven northern route that can expedite shipments of equipment to and from Fort Mcmurray to oil-hungry customers in China and India may just be the answer.
“We need to look at as many options as possible,” says Travis Davies of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, “mostly in terms of moving equipment and components.”
As the producers of oil from the bituminous sands continue to expand their operations, Davies notes, “We’ve got an amazing resource here and we need to continue to explore all kinds of ways to get it to market.”
Imperial Oil may also need to consider using water routes up the Mackenzie, Slave and Athabasca rivers to bring heavy machinery to existing operations in Fort Mcmurray and especially for its Kearl oilsands project, currently under construction.
Attempts to bring components through Washington State and Idaho have been delayed. “Imperial continuously assesses a variety of transportation routes to serve its operations and opportunities in the oilsands,” said Pius Rolheiser, Imperial’s public and government affairs spokesman. “We assess the viability of transportation routes on the basis of safety, reliability and cost-effectiveness.”
It would be a hard slog to get any northern oil route approved, as seen by the 30-year-old (and still waiting) Mackenzie Valley pipeline proposal.
If a way were to be found, oil and its related equipment would be the latest in a long list of products transported on the Slave River. Formed where the Athabasca and Peace rivers come together, the Slave River was a lifeline for explorers, fur traders and early oilmen. Today, society is built around the road. But 200 years ago rivers were the superhighways of Canada.
The Hudson’s Bay Company dominated the fur trade, and its transportation routes were central to commerce in the Canadian West. The mail, supplies and raw furs travelled the rivers. Maps in the early 1800s showed no roads, but many fur trade posts stood on the shores of the biggest rivers. Edmonton, for example, began its life in 1795 as a trading post. It was an important stop along the cross-canada route between England and Fort Vancouver on the West Coast.
The North Saskatchewan River linked Edmonton into the intricate Churchill River waterway system that ended up in Hudson Bay. To the north, the Clearwater River was an important part of the transportation system. It flows into the Athabasca River near today’s Fort Mcmurray.
The Methye Portage links it to the Churchill River system, too. This important link between east-flowing and north-flowing river systems allowed the Hudson’s Bay Company to exploit the furs of the northwest. In large birch bark canoes, and in even larger planked York boats, the fur trade extended its reach far down the Mackenzie River to the Arctic Ocean. Explorers in this region included Alexander Mackenzie, who in 1789 travelled the length of the 1,760-kilometre-long river that now bears his name. But that big river drained into the Arctic Ocean, not the Pacific.
In 1804 the Hudson’s Bay Company built a trading post at today’s Fort Simpson — at the confluence of the Liard and Mackenzie rivers. In 1805 it built another one where the Bear River flows into the Mackenzie River — now Fort Good Hope, N.W.T. The system expanded in the early 1800s, and might have become even greater but for one navigational challenge.
Near the border between Alberta and the Northwest Territories, four sets of violent rapids in one 25-km stretch prevent river travel. In the days of canoes and York boats, river craft had to be portaged around four mighty rapids: Cassette, Mountain Portage, Pelican and Rapids of the Drowned. All but the Rapids of the Drowned are in Alberta.
The total drop is 33 metres, or about 100 feet. That’s why a 40-km portage road links Fort Fitzgerald, Alta., to Bell Rock, just north of Fort Smith, N.W.T. River navigation is hindered, but not impossible, along this stretch of the Slave River. If not for the rapids, large ocean vessels could ascend the Mackenzie River, cross Great Slave Lake, and continue up the Slave and Athabasca rivers to the geographical centre of Alberta — the town of Athabasca. And large and heavy loads could be brought to the massive industrial area farther north at Fort Mcmurray.
One of the challenges of the North is its dis- tance from markets and suppliers of machinery and supplies. But that did not stop the U.S. army during the Second World War. In 1942, Fort Smith had a population of just 250, but it played host to 2,000 American soldiers. They portaged thousands of loads of oilfield and pipelining equipment around the Slave River rapids in aid of the booming oilfield at Norman Wells.
Their efforts also made possible the construction of history’s most expensive and shortestlived pipeline. The Canadian American Norman Oil Line (CANOL) cost almost $2 billion in today’s currency, or five times the original estimate. The wartime CANOL pipeline operated only in 1944-45, and delivered fewer than a million barrels of oil from Norman Wells to Whitehorse in the Yukon — at a cost of about $200 a barrel in 2011 currency. Strange things, indeed, are done in the land of the midnight sun.
Another unusual transportation route was used to deliver four Soviet-made turbines to B.C. Hydro’s Canyon Dam on the Peace River in northeastern British Columbia in 1977.
The route from Leningrad to Hudson’s Hope challenged every conventional transportation system at the time. No regular roads, railways or shipping routes could handle the 230-tonne turbines. Hauling them west across the frozen muskeg from Hudson Bay proved impossible, too.
Meg Stanley’s recent book, Voices From Two Rivers, Harvesting the Power of the Peace and
Columbia, explains the trip from Russia to northeastern B.C. Contractors for B.C. Hydro hauled the turbines and other equipment overland on a massive trailer on logging trails and other roads, and on a barge where waterways went the right direction. It took four months to move the loads the 1,600 kilometres to the dam site.
“With weather and schedule worries in full play, this was one of the most anxious times of the project and felt somewhat like putting a man on the moon,” recalled contracts engineer Joe West.
By comparison, the portage around the rapids on the Slave River in northeastern Alberta is a simple detour.
Alberta’s only historic seaport may once again come to life. As Alberta’s oilsands region continues to expand and seeks new markets in Asia, perhaps the option of using this connection to the oceans of the world will become viable once more.