3rd World Congress of Environmental History

How to Build the World’s Largest Trans-Continental Oil Pipeline

• In Event: Energy and History: Wind, Water, and Oil

Abstract

From 1949 to 1987, Interprovincial Pipe Line Company constructed and operated what was, for a time, the world’s largest oil pipeline. Composed of multiple lines spanning thousands of kilometres, the Interprovincial pipeline system travels west to east from Edmonton to Montreal with a loop that travel south to Chicago and a spur to Buffalo. When the line first opened, it was a relatively modest 16-inch diameter pipeline that delivered crude oil from Edmonton to Regina. By the late 1980s, it consisted of nine separate lines that shipped billions of litres of crude oil and other liquid petroleum products to refineries in five Canadian provinces and five US states. The Interprovincial pipeline system is the backbone of Canada’s domestic oil transportation and key to the country’s transition to a high-energy economy in the second half of the twentieth century. It is also a major supplier of oil to the US, the world’s largest consumer market for fossil fuels in the twentieth century.

The environmental consequences of the construction of this energy infrastructure system were enormous. Millions of litres of oil spilled from the pipeline through leaks both large and small. Construction and expansion of the system disrupted agricultural land. The successful delivery of massive quantities of crude oil to refineries eventually reached consumers who burned the refined products and emitted the waste into the atmosphere, largely in the form of carbon dioxide.

This paper and poster will explain how this pipeline was built and expanded over a period of over three decades through both large-scale megaprojects and small, annual incremental growth. Using HGIS methods, it will show how a major corporation created one of the most consequential pieces of energy infrastructure in Canadian history.

Author

• Sean Kheraj, York University