Army & Navy – Gas for the Planes to Asia

On the wild western rim of Canada’s Northwest Territories, 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle, the U.S. Army is in the oil business.

With military supervision and secrecy, and with plentiful U.S. funds, wells are being brought in as fast as the drills can go down. Pipelines are being strung through some of the roughest country on the continent. Refineries and tank farms are going up to make and store gasoline and oil for the planes to Asia.

Strategically, the booming Norman Wells development on the banks of the Mackenzie is of highest importance. The field is fortunately placed on the global maps. From North America to Asia, air routes over Alaska and the Aleutians are considerably shorter than the transpacific route via Hawaii. Gas within pipe-spurt of the northern take-off fields, aviation gas which need not be trucked or flown in, is vital in the Army’s aeropolitics.

But even military necessity has economic limits. Last week in Washington, as not long before in the Yukon’s Whitehorse, the Truman Committee was blood-hounding the question whether this farthest north oilfield was not also farthest north in cost to the U.S.

Mackenzie’s Oil. The glitter of oil is not new on the Mackenzie River above the old Hudson’s Bay post at Fort Norman. Young Alex Mackenzie, who scouted the north country for the fur trade in the late 18th Century, made a note of the surface seepage. But not until 1914, after Turner Valley made Canada conscious of oil, did a geologist venture to Fort Norman. Not until 1920 was the first well brought in, after prodigious pioneering.

The year before. Imperial Oil Ltd. —Standard Oil Co. (NJ.) subsidiary— had sent young Theodore Augustus Link, fresh out of the University of Chicago, to sound out the possibilities. Lanky Dr. Link made his surveys, waited over the winter, after the ice left set out on Great Slave Lake with a motorboat, two scows overloaded with supplies, drill crews and an ox named “Nig.” Eventually, after the ox had hauled the rig into position, the drillers ate Nig.

Oil was not worth much in the back pack, dog-team and canoe economy of the north country. Soon Imperial capped its wells, laid low until 1932 when the radium and the later gold-mining push at Great Bear Lake and Yellowknife, and the advent of air communication, made a teakettle refinery at Norman Wells worth while. For ten years the half-pint plant was operated in the open-water season, closed down for the winter.

Then came Pearl Harbor, the Jap landings in the Aleutians, the U.S. military airfields chaining north to Alaska, the Alaska Military Highway to serve the airports. Gas & oil achieved military importance. Norman Wells stirred.

Army’s Contract. To Washington and Whitehorse and Norman Wells shuttled U.S. and Canadian officials and oilmen. Finally a contract was signed by which the U.S. Army would help develop the field. It would also build a pipeline of some 500 miles for the crude to a U.S. refinery at Whitehorse, plus gasoline lines to Skagway (on tidewater), Fairbanks, and the airfield at Watson Lake. In all. some 1,600 miles of pipeline, over the toughest terrain imaginable, plus an oilfield as industrially remote as Africa.

Bull wheels turned again at Norman Wells. New wells came in. Tractors cat-walked along the timbered slopes and the boulder-flooded valleys. Trucks labeled “Canol” (for “Canadian Oil”) labored up new-made roads. Men sweated their way through mosquitoes and muskeg; swatted themselves for warmth through the winter. By this year’s end, Canol’s builders hope to have the pipelines and the refinery in operation. But men who watched wondered in what good time, and at what cost.

Taxpayer’s Price. The need was great, the oil was there. It is good oil, of high gasoline content and such low pourpoint that the pipeline can be laid on the surface. Because of remoteness and the original need for military secrecy, the wells and the pipelines have been pushed along with a minimum of press and public knowledge.

Guesstimates of cost run from a mere hundred million to a quarter billion dollars —Canadian. Nothing has been made public of the contract signed by O. P. Easterwood, Captain, Corps of Engineers, U.S.A., and C. A. Eames and T. F. Edgerton for Imperial Oil Ltd.

But a Canadian Order in Council provides that six months after war’s end half of all oil wells and similar developments revert to the Dominion, the other half to the company developing the project.

Net of this appears to be that the U.S.

Government will have no postwar share in the field it financed and developed. That is why the Truman Committee thinks the contract rates a good close scrutiny. Certainly, in local opinion, the Canol project will never pay its cost at present production. Only if larger reserves, now being sought, are found will the U.S. stand a chance of getting its money’s worth, beyond military value.