Canada's Environmental Conscience as old as the Oil Industry itself

Alberta, Canada take measured apporach to mitigation

The province's environmental conscience is as old as its first gusher

BY GORDON JAREMKO

May 01, 2010

   

“It’s a marathon, not a sprint; it needs to be done over time.”
– Federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice
Photograph by John Gaucher

Gerry DeSorcy helped the goose that lays Alberta’s golden eggs grow up. When he landed his first job as a novice engineer in 1955 with the province’s Energy Resources Conservation Board, the Leduc discovery that launched the modern Canadian oil and gas industry 40 kilometers southwest of downtown Edmonton was only eight years old.

As DeSorcy arrived on the scene, Canada’s oil production averaged 353,000 barrels a day – just 58 per cent of national consumption in 1955, and only one-eighth of today’s output. Long-distance transportation of natural gas to lucrative markets was still a pipe dream. Alberta’s 1955 royalty revenue – $20 million ($237 million in today’s money) – was only half as much as the $40 million which eager companies spent that year on growth visions by buying drilling targets at provincial mineral rights auctions.

But the ERCB was a watchdog with teeth by the time Leduc ushered Alberta into the oil big-time. The board packed power that grew out of early battles before the Second World War to control the industry’s small but rowdy Turner Valley cradle, where fiercely independent fortune hunters fought all regulation as “bolshevism.”

The watchdog bared its teeth when a followup to Leduc called Atlantic No. 3 blew out and caught fire in 1948, making Alberta’s black gold bonanza famous on front pages and movie screens around the world by spewing an atom bomb-sized mushroom cloud of black smoke into the sky. The board took over the well, plugged it, snuffed out the fire, cleaned up the spill and collected the disaster’s $1.8-million cost from the company involved. By the time DeSorcy began his 38-year career of rising through the ERCB ranks to chairman, making industry behave responsibly was standard Alberta procedure.

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