Transient Sojourners and Technological Advances: Oil and Gas Exploration in Canada’s High Arctic in the 1960s and 1970s

• In Event: Energy Frontiers in the Late 20th Century

Abstract

In the late 1960s and 1970s oil and gas exploration in the Canadian High Arctic began in earnest. After oil was discovered in neighboring Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay in 1968 the Canadian government supported exploratory activities in its northernmost territory. This “quest” for oil and gas was further facilitated by the nationalist agenda of Prime Minister Trudeau as well as the energy crises of the early 1970s. Companies such as Panarctic Oil Ltd. or Dome Petroleum Ltd. brought workers, engineers and equipment from Canada’s South to the Arctic but they faced immense technological and logistical challenges. Still, both corporate and government actors were optimistic that they could find solutions to these problems and began planning artificial islands and drill ships as well as pipelines and LNG carriers. In their endeavors they saw the Arctic as a site for technological advances and not as an environmental space that may need to be protected or a homeland for indigenous peoples. Workers were flown in and out and so were government officials. All of them were transient sojourners. Some companies even restricted access to the drilling locations to men;, only very few locals were employed. But what kind of attachment did these Southerners have to Canada’s High Arctic? Did the environment play any role in the minds of workers, who labored on drilling sites, or engineers, who searched for technological solutions? After all, the 1960s clean air legislations and the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill had reminded the North American public of the environmental impact of energy exploration activities. On the basis of oral history documents this paper will address these questions and examine the link between oil and gas exploration and the construction of the Canadian Arctic space as technological frontier in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Author

• Petra Dolata, University of Calgary