Peter McKenzie-Brown
This history celebrates
the sesquicentennial of Confederation of Canada’s first provinces in 1867. Work
on this project was made possible by a grant from the Alberta Historical
Resources Foundation.
This book is about the water and water systems
within the province of Alberta. It is therefore about the basis of life and
livelihood within this little piece of Canada, which is part of a small planet in
a small solar system in a small galaxy in an incomprehensibly large universe.
This introduction sets the stage by
describing the extraordinary story of water – its origins, its odd
characteristics, its profound impact on our planet and a few of the thoughts
the substance has engendered. Because of the remarkable coincidence of Earth’s
location in the solar system – a Goldilocks place which is not too hot and not
too cold – water exists on this planet in solid, liquid and gaseous states. It
is the only substance that exists in all three states at temperatures normally
prevailing on Earth.[1]
The place to begin is with the thought that
perhaps 98% of the water on the planet is poisonous to landlubbers. You can’t
drink water straight from the seas and oceans. Yet, as the graphic[2]
illustrates, the remarkable climate on our planet has rendered that problem
soluble.
According
to hydrologist S.K. Gupta, there are 1,386 million cubic kilometres (km3)
of water on the planet.[3]
A cubic kilometre of water equals one trillion litres, so once you start doing
the math, the volumes quickly become mind-boggling.
“Of the freshwater on Earth, much more
is stored in the ground than is available in lakes and rivers,” he continues. “More
than 8,400,000 km3 of freshwater is stored in the Earth, most within
one-half mile of the surface. But, if you really want to find freshwater, the
most is stored in the 29,200,000 km3 of water found in glaciers and
icecaps, mainly in the Polar Regions and in Greenland.”
In his book
about water,
a former Lieutenant Governor of Alberta, Grant McEwan (1902-2000), offers an
excellent introduction to the hydrological cycle.
“Water
should inspire sweet songs of praise as the Earth’s circulating masterpiece,”
he wrote. “Call it what you like – the hydrological cycle, or simply Nature’s
mighty water wheel – it is the biggest cleanup show on earth.” It plays out in
the “clouds, fields, streams and lakes” and “deep beneath the surface of the
planet” in countless aquifers. These systems provide water for agriculture,
drinking and household use. The water in lakes and rivers plays important roles
in urban consumption and power generation, and has endless industrial applications.
The
movement of water within the hydrological cycle can take many different routes.
Rain falling upon the ocean quickly becomes salty. But then some of its
molecules begin to evaporate into the atmosphere to meet the cycle’s later needs.
The molecules rising from the ocean leave behind the complex materials of the
saltwater. By volume, the dissolved materials in the ocean are mostly salts.
Water
is a polar molecule. It consists of two hydrogen atoms attached to a central
oxygen atom at an angle, as illustrated.[4]
The oxygen atom is highly electronegative, a physical property that enables it
to attract bonded electron pairs towards itself. When oxygen bonds with water,
it gains a partial negative charge, and confers upon the hydrogen atoms a
partial positive charge. The partial charges in a water molecule interact with
other molecules that are charged, in the following way.
When
added to water, ionic molecules – those which have a net positive or negative
electrical charge because the total number of electrons is not equal to the
total number of protons – split into positive and negative ions. The positive
ions are surrounded by the oxygen atoms of the water molecules, since they have
a partial negative charge. By contrast, the negative ions find themselves
attracted to water’s partially positive hydrogen atoms. Since each ion is
surrounded by water molecules, the ions are said to be hydrated and remain
separated from one another. With its ions completely dispersed in water, the
substance is part of a water solution. Similarly, polar substances are made of
molecules that interact with one another through dipole interactions. If you
add a polar compound to water, two things happen: Its positive elements combine
with the negative atoms of oxygen in the water molecules, while its negative
elements combine with the positive hydrogen atoms. When the water completely surrounds
the polar substance, we say it has dissolved.[5]
Strangely,
though, from the point of view of quantum mechanics, the most important
scientific theory of the twentieth century, how water molecules form hydrogen
bonds with their neighbours is “to create the magical properties of that vital
liquid” is itself a “mystery,” writes CalTech physicist Leonard Mlodinow.[6]
The world’s
water originated with the planet itself, which coalesced about 4.5 billion
years ago out of the remnants of a “big bang.” Astrophysicists have calculated
that our universe exploded into existence out of a “singularity” some 13.7
billion years ago.
“Most, if not all, the water on
the surface of the Earth at this time came from the rocks and ice that had
coalesced to form in the first place. But the early planet had trouble keeping
hold of these water molecules. Without a fully developed atmosphere, they would
have escaped the Earth and boiled off into space,” wrote Alok Jha.
“Once
the planet’s mass was largely in place, the atmosphere stabilised. All the
while, water was being pushed to the surface by the colossal geological
processes that gave Earth its internal structure. Heavy elements like iron
largely flowed to the centre, and the distinct layers of crust, mantle and core
we see today began to form. Water and other volatile compounds from the rocks
were driven upwards as the mantle cooled. Volcanoes and other fissures in the
crust allowed superheated water vapour to escape into the atmosphere.
“Despite
the high temperatures on the Earth’s surface – more than 200°C – pools of
liquid water are thought to have existed there are those first 100 million
years, thanks to the immense pressure of an atmosphere, which was rich in
nitrogen, water vapour and carbon dioxide. A few hundred million years after
the birth of our planet, the atmospheric pressure had dropped (thanks to
following carbon dioxide levels), and the temperature had dropped to (for the
same reason). Now the Earth was cool enough for liquid water to stay put. At
this point, somewhere around 4 billion years ago, the water vapour in the air
began to condense out and it rained. And rained. Possibly for millennia.”[7]
It
is important to understand that oxygen and hydrogen both are extremely active
in a chemical sense, but once they form chemical bonds those bonds are hard to
break. Almost all of the water on earth today has been on the planet for eons. Water
is such a stable atom that much of the water we drink today nourished microbes
when they first appeared on our planet. Larger creatures were not viable until
some of those tiny creatures developed the chemical chlorophyll. Chlorophyll
was behind the photosynthesis by which today’s plants absorb energy from the
Sun. In the beginning, however, most organisms consisted of individual cells
occasionally organized into colonies. Contemporary
science sees the Gaia hypothesis – a notion put forth by British thinker James
Lovelock, and which we will return to later on – as, at best, a metaphor.
One of the deans of contemporary earth
science, Cambridge University’s Ted Nield, has written a masterful chronology
of the planet which shows life originating long before Earth’s atmosphere began
to change. Nield’s volume doesn’t mention Lovelock or his ideas. Citing
contemporary scholarship, Nield reminds his readers that “the first living
cells formed on the floor of Earth’s first newly-condensed oceans, where warm,
alkaline submarine springs focused chemical energy, and the mixing of hot
spring water and seawater caused simple chemicals to precipitate out as thin,
inorganic films.”[8]
These early slimes originated about 4.4 billion years ago, and can be found in
the geological record.[9]
About 3.5 billion years ago, when a
supercontinent named Ur dominated the planet, a fundamental shift took place.
Some of the primeval slimes learned to photosynthesize, and soon began pouring
a deadly gas, oxygen, into an atmosphere then comprised mostly of carbon
dioxide, methane and nitrogen. Before oxygen “could build up in the air to
levels that could support oxygen-breathing animals, the products of the first
photo-synthesizing organisms had to oxidize all the [Earth’s] iron and sulphur.
These elements constituted a vast oxygen ‘sink’; one that geological evidence
suggests was not completely filled for as long as 1.6 billion years.”[10]
Created
in the Big Bang which astrophysicists have described as the origin of the
Universe, oxygen is the third-most abundant element in the universe – after
hydrogen and helium (which between them make up 99.9 percent of known matter in
the universe.) These three elements were forged in the superhot, super-dense,
cores of stars.
Oxygen is a highly reactive element, which can
form compounds with nearly every other chemical element. Thus, it is odd that
there are so many free oxygen molecules in the atmosphere. A related mystery is
that Earth’s atmosphere remains stable at 21 percent oxygen. “It’s not that
easy why it should balance at 21 percent rather than 10 or 40 percent,” said
geoscientist James Kasting. “We don’t understand the modern oxygen control
system that well.”[11]
Although the mechanism that keeps
oxygen levels in the air stable is not clear, the original source of that free
oxygen is clear. Tiny organisms known as cyanobacteria, a kind of blue-green
algae, were the first to conduct photosynthesis. These systems use sunshine as
a primary energy source, water and carbon dioxide to produce carbohydrates and oxygen.
In fact, all the plants on Earth incorporate symbiotic cyanobacteria (known as
chloroplasts) for photosynthesis.
But some 2.45 billion years ago, for
the first time oxygen was becoming a significant component of Earth’s
atmosphere. At roughly the same time (and for eons thereafter), oxidized iron
began to appear in ancient soils and bands of iron were deposited on the
seafloor, a product of reactions with oxygen in the seawater.
Climate,
volcanism, plate tectonics all played a key role in regulating the oxygen level
during various time periods. Yet no one has come up with a rock-solid test to
determine the precise oxygen content of the atmosphere at any given time from
the geologic record. But one thing is clear—the origins of oxygen in Earth’s
atmosphere derive from one thing: life.
“What
it looks like is that oxygen was first produced somewhere around 2.7 billion to
2.8 billion years ago. It took up residence in the atmosphere around 2.45
billion years ago,” according to geochemist Dick Holland. “It looks as if there’s
a significant time interval between the appearance of oxygen-producing
organisms and the actual oxygenation of the atmosphere.”
So
a date and a culprit can be fixed for what scientists refer to as the Great
Oxidation Event, but mysteries remain. What occurred 2.45 billion years ago
that enabled cyanobacteria to take over? What were oxygen levels at that time?
Why did it take another one billion years—dubbed the “boring billion” by
scientists—for oxygen levels to rise high enough to enable the evolution of
animals?
Climate,
volcanism, plate tectonics all played a key role in regulating the oxygen level
during various time periods. Yet no one has come up with a rock-solid test to
determine the precise oxygen content of the atmosphere at any given time from
the geologic record. But one thing is clear—the origins of oxygen in Earth’s
atmosphere derive from one thing: life. [12]
Life gradually adapted to the presence
of oxygen, became ever more complicated in form, and gradually spread beyond
the oceans. “The growth of oxygen has not been steady,” says Nield. “There have
been times when much more oxygen was present in the air than now; for example,
during the Carboniferous Period, just as Pangaea was forming. Coal forests then
covered much of the planet, pumping out oxygen and sequestering carbon.”[13]
One
of the wastes from this development was the excretion of oxygen, which began to
poison Earth’s atmosphere. This, of course, was a transformational event in the
planet’s life. By separating carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen, it made
carbon available for the development of carbon-based life, and oxygen to
provide them with readily available energy. It led to the Cambrian explosion –
the relatively short (20 million years in length) evolutionary event which
began around 541 million years ago. During that geologically brief period, the
fossil record shows, most major animal phyla appeared. Over the following 70 to
80 million years, the rate of diversification accelerated. Larger creatures
evolved: insects, reptiles, birds and mammals – at least 8.7 million species,
in today’s world.[14]
The
precipitation that falls on land serves exactly the same purpose, but takes a
more roundabout course in furnishing the vapour needed in the atmosphere. It
can fall as rain or snow. It can penetrate the earth or become runoff, which
flows along creeks and streams to lakes, most of which empty into rivers which,
often in roundabout ways, flow into salty oceans.
If it soaks into the ground, it gradually adds
to the groundwater supply, where it may sit for thousands of years before
slowly moving on. It may then enter an underground water course before draining
into an aquifer or stream to blend with a larger flow – ultimately finding
itself, as a contributory to an ocean, part of the world’s largest body of
water.
“It
will then evaporate from the surface of the ocean to the atmosphere to await
some particles of dust around which drops of water will form, McEwan continues.
“Eventually the water will plummet earthward as rain to start the turn of the
water wheel all over again.”[15]
If
the planet’s total water supply were equally distributed, the amount for each
man, woman and child would far exceed their need. And yet many still face the
threat of shortages of good drinking water. Concerned citizens dare not relax
their emphasis on water drinking quality. If there is not enough good water,
the challenge must be nothing less than conversion to drinking water of the
required amounts. It is a process which is technologically feasible today, and
will become an inescapable necessity in the future.[16]
“As
far as the world’s food is concerned, all people must learn together to make
proper use of the earth in which we live. Hovering even now over our shoulders
is a spectre as sinister as the atomic bomb because it could depopulate the
earth and destroy our cities. This creeping terror is the wastage of the world’s
natural resources and, particularly, the criminal exploitation of the soil.
What will it profit us to achieve the H-bomb and survive that tragedy or
triumph, if the generations that succeed in this must starve in a world because
of our misuse, grown barren as the mountains of the moon?”[17]
“Over
the course of 3,000 years, on average, the Earth’s hydrological cycle, moving
water from the surface to atmosphere and back, processes an amount of water
equivalent to all of the world’s oceans. We know this movement of water as
weather.”
“By
comparing the relative composition of carbon and 55 million-year-old
foraminifera shells at different places in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, the
oceanographers saw that the gradient in relative amounts of the two types of
carbon was reversed – the Atlantic’s deep water current was flowing from north
to south. Intriguingly, the flipping direction seemed to occur very fast – in
just a few thousand years – but it took more than 100,000 years to revert.
“It
is not clear what caused these huge changes,” McEwan said, “but it is likely
that the dense, salty water near the poles would have had to become fresher in
order for the current to become compromised. Perhaps the warmer seas produced
more evaporation in the tropics, which then turned into clouds and rain at
higher latitudes, delivering more fresh water into (and therefore compromising
the action of) a part of the ocean that would normally be a heavy, salt-water
sink.” The result, in any case, was a water current that included sinking salty
water driving one end of a fast global conveyor belt. The message, of course,
is that changes to climate can be fast and huge.[18]
“Perhaps
the most talked about effect of climate change is sea level rise, and with good
reason – the rate of rise since the mid-19th century has been larger
than the average rate during the previous two millennia. From the period 1901
to 2010, the world’s average sea level rose by 0.19 M, at a rate of 1.7 mm per
year between 1901 and 2010, 2 mm per year between 1971 and 2010 and 3.2 mm per
year between 1993 and 2010. Different parts of the world have seen (and will
continue to see) different amounts of sea level rise – rates are three times
higher than the average in the Western Pacific and the Southeast Asian region,
whereas they are decreasing in the eastern Pacific for the period 1993-2012.”[19] However,
water is such an odd stuff that it probably has a greater impact on our planet
than any other single substance. Consider the following:
All
kinds of things will dissolve in water, which is sometimes called a “universal
solvent”. It dissolves more substances than any other liquid. “This feature
enables water to dissolve and carry minerals and nutrients in runoff,
infiltration, groundwater flow, and also in the bodies of living organisms.”[20] Water can
dissolve many of the rocks which make up our planet, for example. It can absorb
carbon, nitrogen and sulphur oxides to form acids. This is because ionic
substances – atoms or molecules in which the total number of electrons is not
equal to the total number of protons, giving the atom or molecule a net
positive or negative electrical charge – are everywhere in nature.
“Water
also has interesting thermal properties. When heated from 0°C (melting point of
ice) to 4°C, the contraction becomes denser; most other substances expand and
become less dense when heated. In the case of water this happens only beyond
4°C. Conversely, when water is cooled in the temperature range four to 0°C, it
expands. It expands greatly as it freezes, adding about 9 percent by volume; as
a consequence, ice is less dense than water and, therefore, floats on it.”[21]
Another
unique property of water is its high specific heat. “Water can absorb a lot of
heat before it begins to get hot and its temperature changes significantly.
This is why water is valuable to industries for cooling purposes and is also
used in an automobile the oil radiator is a coolant. The high specific heat of
water, present in the air as moisture, also helps regulate the rate at which
the temperature of the year changes, which is why the temperature changes
between seasons are gradual rather than abrupt, except in coastal areas.”[22]
Water
is also unique in another thermal property, latent heat, the heat change
associated with the change of state or phase. Latent heat, also called heat of
transformation, is a measure of the heat given up or absorbed by a unit mass
set of substance as it changes its form from solid to liquid, from liquid to
gas, or vice versa. It is called latent because it is not associated with the
change in temperature. Each substance has a characteristic heat of fusion,
associated with the solid-liquid transition, and a characteristic heat of
vaporization, associated with the liquid to gas transition. “The latent heat of
fusion for ice is 334 J (equals 80 Cal) per gram. This amount of heat is
absorbed by each gram of ice in melting was given up by each gram of water during
freezing. The latent heat of vaporization of steam is 2,260 joules, taken up by
boiling water at 100°C to form steam or given up during condensation from
vapour to liquid, that is, when steam condenses to form water. This is the
reason that putting one’s finger in a jet of steam causes more severe burning
than dipping it in boiling water at 100 and degrees Celsius for substance
passing directly from the solid to the gaseous state, or vice versa, the heat
absorbed or released is known as the latent heat of sublimation.[23]
Another
odd phenomenon is that, when both hot water and cold water are placed in
sub-zero temperatures at the same time, it is the hot water that freezes first.[24]
Imagine
our planet as a living creature. The concept isn’t new – many peoples have seen
Earth and our seas as members of a pantheon of gods and goddesses. One of those
names, Gaia, is a transliteration of the name for the Greek goddess
representing Earth. In 1965, British thinker James Lovelock came up with a notion
he called the Gaia hypothesis.
Because
of his involvement with America’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which played a
role in the American space program, Lovelock had given considerable thought to
issues related to interplanetary space. So when the discussion turned to
searching for life on nearby planets he suggested searching for the reversal of
entropy[25] – the
tendency of closed systems to move endlessly toward greater disorder. Put
another way, the idea was to see whether there were any systems in Mars or
Venus that organized themselves, rather than moved toward increasing
disorder. His observation, of course, was based on the reality that living
systems on Earth continually reorder themselves – that is, reversed entropy.
“Chance
favoured me with a view of the Earth from space and I saw it as the stunningly
beautiful anomaly of the solar system – a planet that was palpably different
from its dead and deserted siblings, Mars and Venus,” He wrote
in his autobiography.” I saw Earth as much more than just a ball
of rock moistened by the oceans, or a space ship put there by a beneficent God
just for the use of humankind. I saw it as a planet that has always, since its
origins nearly four billion years ago, kept itself a fit home for the life that
happened upon it and I thought that it did so by homeostasis, the wisdom of the
body, just as you and I keep our temperature and chemistry constant. In this
view the spontaneous evolution of life did more than make Darwin’s world: it
created a joint project with the evolving earth itself. Life does more than
adapt to Earth; it changes it, and evolution is a tight-coupled dance with life
and the material environment as partners and from the dance emerges the entity
Gaia.”[26]
Earth is a living planet in the sense that Earth’s atmosphere is 79%
nitrogen and 21% oxygen, with traces of carbon dioxide, methane and argon. By
itself, the composition of our atmosphere would cause interstellar atmospheric
scientists to scratch their heads, since oxygen oxidizes almost everything in sight,
forming stable compounds. Similarly, nitrogen forms nitrates, which logically
should simply dissolve into seas, lakes and oceans. According to Lovelock, the
difference is Gaia, which transforms the outer layer of the planet into
environments suitable for growth.
Self-regulating feedback mechanisms keep the planet habitable despite
extreme disequilibrium everywhere. The elements in the atmosphere are
remarkably stable – indeed, they are optimal for Earth’s dominant organisms.[27] Gaia mostly
hosts carbon-based life, and those organisms require oxygen to breathe and low
levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to maintain moderate temperatures.
Indeed, for billions of years the brightness of the sun has been increasing,
which means that, if carbon sequestration had not developed
naturally, reducing to trace amounts the presence of carbon dioxide and methane
in the atmosphere, the temperature of our planet would have been increasing
instead of undergoing billions of years of decline.
To a large degree through the agency of microorganisms, Earth developed
systems for storing these molecules safely away. “The continental shelves may also be
vital in the regulation of the oxygen-carbon cycle,” adds Lovelock. “It is
through the burial of carbon in the anaerobic muds of the sea-bed that a net
increment of oxygen in the atmosphere is ensured. Without carbon burial, which
leaves one additional oxygen molecule in the air for each carbon atom thus
removed from the cycle of photosynthesis and respiration, oxygen would
inevitably decline in concentration in the atmosphere until it almost reached
the vanishing-point.”[28]
Over the longer term the idea hasn’t gained much scientific traction.
One reason is that his ideas reflect
a certain whimsy; another is that they represent anthropic reasoning.
Given our position on the planet, isn’t it obvious that we would see the world
as having been created especially for humankind? Yes, but isn’t that the stuff
of religion?
To a large degree, astrophysics itself put an end to the Gaia
Hypothesis. Since Lovelock first put forward his proposal, the various sciences
looking out into our galaxy have calculated there could be as many as 40
billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of sun-like stars
and red dwarf stars within the Milky Way Galaxy alone. Given such vast numbers,
thinking about the universe only from the perspective of our own evolution
makes little sense.
As science historian Timothy Ferris explains, anthropic thinking “attempts
to constrain facts about the universe by taking into account our presence here.
To ‘constrain’ means, in this context, to improve our ability to calculate the
odds of nature’s being the way it is, by reducing its potential states from an
infinite number to the much smaller set of states in which it is possible for
life to exist…. [Thus] the deck can hold only cards with values quite close to
the one we drew. Otherwise there would be nobody around to draw the card.”[29]
In today’s world, there is no doubt that
petroleum is a by-product of the decomposition of living things, so it is worth
going back in time to the ages when its formation began. In those times, the
most basic features of the planet’s surface were dramatically different from
the ones we know today.
Between 1885 and 1909, Austrian
geoscientist Eduard Suess published four volumes explaining the nature of the
last great supercontinent and, in fact, named it Pangaea.[30]
Using fossil records from the Alps and Africa, he also proposed that it had
contained an inland sea, which he named after the Greek sea goddess Tethys.
When the theory of plate tectonics became established in the 1960s, it became
clear that Suess’s sea had in fact been an ocean, and contributed to the
present petroleum wealth of today’s Gulf of Mexico. Plate tectonics also
provided the mechanism by which the former ocean disappeared. In plate tectonic
theory, oceanic crust can subduct under the continental crust.
About 300 million years ago, during
the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras, the present continents formed this
supercontinent – a word based on the Greek prefix “pan,” which means “all” and
the noun Gaea, which is a variant of Gaia. The idea originated with a German
scientist, Alfred Wegener.[31]
The latest thinking about Pangaea is that it was only one of many
supercontinents on our planet, and that there will be many more to come. They
break up and form again, deep in Earth’s history.[32]
Although new lands like Iceland do emerge through the forces of plate tectonics,
for the most part the world’s archipelagos and continents are pieces of a
smashed plate – a plate which was once a supercontinent. My favourite factoid
about tectonics is that Africa and South America are drifting apart at about
the same rate your fingernails grow.
Today’s continents will crash together
again about 250 million years from now. That makes a nice symmetry, since
Pangaea began to break apart around 250 million years ago. The continents
drifted ever farther from each other, heading toward their modern positions.
The part of Pangaea that became North America was subject to repeated ocean
inundations and orogenies (periods of mountain building) over the millions of
years before a period of uplift broke Pangaea apart and the modern continents
began drifting away from mid-ocean ridges. Chains of enormous mountains were
worn flat, again and again, by the forces of erosion. The resulting sediments
were carried by wind and water to such depressional areas as lakes, ocean
margins and deltas, where they were laid down layer upon layer.[33]
Long-gone oceans, primordial seas and
smaller bodies of water produced complex environmental conditions that raised
the prevalence of microscopic life and ensured its deep burial, producing what
eventually became the earth’s main oil reservoirs.
In a brief article on the origin of
oil, geoscientist William Broad explains that the real breakthrough in
understanding the origins of oil came in the 1930s. At that time a German
chemist named Alfred E. Treibs, “discovered that oil harbored the fossil remains
of chlorophyll, the compound in plants that helps convert sunlight into
chemical energy. The source appeared to be the tiny plants of ancient seas….”
“The sheer mass is hard to imagine,”
he continues. “But scientists note that every drop of seawater contains more
than a million tiny organisms. Oil production begins when surface waters become
so rich in microscopic life that the rain of debris outpaces decay on the
seabed. The result is thickening accumulations of biologic sludge. The standard
temperature for oil formation is between 120 and 210 degrees Fahrenheit. The
earth gets increasingly warm with increasing depth, the temperature eventually
rising so high that rocks melt (and occasionally remerge at the surface in
volcanic eruptions).[34]
During the twentieth century, armies
of geologists have confirmed that beds of marine sediments often indicate the
nearby presence of oil – often, as in North America, in dry land basins that
once hosted marine life. The largest of those basins is the Western Canada Basin,
which hosts the oil sands. As Ned Gilbert explained in a 1951 article, the
basin is more than large enough to contain all of Texas, California, Louisiana,
Oklahoma and Kansas – that is, the states that produced virtually all of
America’s oil production at that time – combined.[35]
The hydrocarbons that formed early on
in this process were essentially light oil and natural gas. However, over the
years much of that oil degraded into what Alain-Yves Huc describes as “heavy
oils, extra-heavy oils and tar sands.” In the introduction to an exhaustive
technical study of heavy oil he edited, Huc describes them as massive world
resources, at least the size of conventional oils. Although found all over the
world, more than half of the world deposits of these unconventional lie in
Western Canada and Venezuela. [36]
Conventional oils are low in viscosity
and clear in colour because they have relatively high ratios of hydrogen to
carbon molecules. Heavy oil and bitumen, which have far more carbon than
hydrogen, are heavy, black, sticky and either slow-pouring or so close to being
solid that they will not pour at all unless heated. The many forms of oil share
the same origin as the lighter conventional oils, but in some cases their
geological fate converted them into thick, viscous tar-like crude oils.
As luck would have it, the shifting of land
masses and the movement of seas led to deposits of oil and gas across the
planet that roughly represent two energy super-provinces. One is in the Old
World; the other, in the New. The Old World super-province stretches from North
Africa through the Middle East into Siberia. Rich with conventional oil and
natural gas, it is the source of most of the petroleum traded on global
markets.[37]
The New World super-province reaches
from northern Alaska and the Beaufort Sea through Alberta’s oil sands down to
Venezuela’s Orinoco heavy oil belt, and continues south between the Atlantic
coast and the eastern Andes. Richer in oil than its Old World sibling, its
conventional resources are in decline everywhere except offshore Brazil, where
vast new fields are under development. This vast region has great volumes of
untapped unconventional resources – notably those in Alberta, and those in
Venezuela’s Orinoco ultra-heavy oil belt.
Canada is well-endowed with
sedimentary basins – primarily because during the Devonian a great inland sea
stretched from today’s Beaufort Sea to the Gulf of Mexico. Most of Canada’s oil
and gas production has come from the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin, a
portion of North America’s Great Interior Basin, which has its southern
terminus in the Gulf of Mexico. The Western Canada Basin begins at the Beaufort
Sea in the north, and stretches south through the Yukon and Northwest
Territories. In southern Canada, it embraces the north-eastern portion of
British Columbia, almost all of Alberta, the southern half of Saskatchewan, and
the south-western corner of Manitoba. To the west, the basin is limited by the
Cordillera, the series of mountain ranges which begins with the Rockies and
continues west to the Pacific Ocean. The eastern boundary is the Precambrian
Shield, the huge expanse of exposed granite that covers two-thirds of Canada.
Precambrian rocks formed before life was plentiful on this planet, and so this
enormous area is unlikely to contain petroleum.[38]
For most of the last three billion
years, much of Western Canada has been under water, with sediments washing into
the eastern side of the province from the Canadian Shield. Indeed, the sand
which now forms oil sands reservoirs originated as sand washed down from the
ancient structures of the Shield, while during the Pre‐Cambrian though the
Triassic eras, what is now the western side of Alberta was exposed to the
Pacific Ocean.
Then tectonic plates – those enormous
structures which land masses ride like kids on massive skateboards, although
the motions can only be detected over geological time – shifted the positions
of the continents. The North American plate moved (“subducted”) under the
Pacific plate between 80 and 55 million years ago. The vast forces caused by
these movements created Western Canada’s mountain ranges, and caused what is
now the province of Alberta to dip to the southwest at between 2 and 10
degrees. As a result, sediments began drifting eastward from the slopes of the
Rocky Mountains. So did light oil, much of which migrated into relatively
shallow reservoirs of sand. These forces created a geological structure known
as a “foreland basin.”[39]
Foreland basins can be thousands of kilometres long and hundreds wide.
When source rocks are present,
these basins develop enormous elongated “kitchens,” which produce vast volumes
of oil. As the illustration shows, in these systems oil migrates up underground
strata from the source rocks to structural and stratigraphic traps at the
margins of the basin.[40]
Underground pressure forces the oil to
soak into shallower silt grade sediments and localized sand bodies in what is
now known as the McMurray formation. Over millions of years, light oil degraded
into bitumen. This took place as lighter hydrocarbons evaporated from the
mixture. More importantly, temperatures were such that bacteria could survive
in those reservoirs.
“Biological alteration is potentially
active as soon as the temperature of the geological environment hosting the oil
is sufficiently low to allow the living processes of these microbial consortia
to take place,” Huc wrote. “Empirically, but based on a large set of
observations, the microbial degradation of oil is assumed to be very active up
to 65oC, but remains significant up to 80oC.”[41]
Over millions of years, these bacteria consumed more of the oil, leaving behind
the heavy gunk now known as bitumen. This heavy oil contains fewer light oils
and more impurities – for example, sulphur and nitrogen compounds and metals.
Although in some cases these resources have commercial value, only about one
percent of the world’s total heavy crude oil deposits are under development.
Although the balance of this book is about
water and water-related issues in Alberta, let’s end this chapter by describing
its resources geographically. The map illustrates the extent of the province’s energy
resources, which includes natural gas, oil, heavy oil, and bitumen in the oil
sands deposits. What the oil industry calls the heavy oil belt is a string of
reservoirs along the southern-most segment of the Saskatchewan-Alberta border.
Lloydminster is its buckle.[42]
Less
obvious in this map is that watersheds literally define the southern half of
the province’s boundary with British Columbia. Demarcation of the boundary
through the Rocky Mountains depended on the flow of water. If it flowed
westward, it belonged to BC; eastward, the prairie region – and ultimately Alberta.
Known as the Continental Divide, the line dividing rivers flowing west to the
Pacific from drainage to the Arctic and Atlantic is easy to visualize, since it
lies along the main ranges of the Rockies. [43]
Alberta has the world’s largest oil
sands deposits, with the three main deposits (shown in light green on the map) in
northern Alberta.[44]
Bitumen can also be found in “bitumen carbonates” – potentially vast reservoirs
in the geological Grosmont formation, which lies deeper in the earth than the oil
sands and heavy oil deposits. Alberta’s enormous deposits of these carbonates –
the oil is much like that in the oil sands – represent 96 per cent of the
entire world’s supply of this black, barely mobile oil. Canada’s bitumen
carbonate deposits form a geometrical shape often referred to as the “carbonate
triangle.”
As this introduction illustrates,
water underlay the life that created these hydrocarbon resources, and it’s as
important today as it has been throughout the eons in which Alberta’s petroleum
resources developed. Although non-renewable oil backstops the province’s economy,
water remains as essential for life as ever, and it’s renewable. The area of
Lake Athabasca that falls inside Alberta’s boundaries is 2,295 square
kilometres and is the largest water surface in the province. The largest lake
completely in Alberta is the remote Lake Claire, which is in the Peace-Athabasca
Delta, in the top right corner of the resource map. The province has nine other
lakes completely within its borders and larger than 100 square kilometres. After
Lake Athabasca and Lake Claire, in order of descending area they include Lesser
Slave Lake, Bistcho Lake, Cold Lake, Utikuma Lake, Lac la Biche, Beavershills
Lake, Calling Lake, Pakowki Lake, and Winefred Lake. The following pages describe
some of the many vital roles water has played in Alberta’s history, and why it requires
careful stewardship.
One of those roles is to provide habitat for
prairie flora and fauna. One of these lakes has been the study area for an
extensive study, and deserves mention here. Located near the town of Tofield, the
research done at Beaverhill Lake provides an extensive inventory of the diversity
of living creatures nourished in prairie wetlands. Before 1865, only indigenous people – in this
case, Cree – lived in the area. At the time, it was known as Beaver or
Beavershills Lake.
Beavershills Lake lies at the heart of
an area recognized as one of North America’s most important wetlands in the
hydrographic basin of North Saskatchewan River. The lake supports hundreds of
plant and animal species in its still, shallow waters, undisturbed by boats or
swimmers. Managed by the Canadian Wildlife Service division of Environment
Canada, it is a site of regional importance in the Western Hemisphere Shorebird
Reserve Network.
As recently as 1990, the lake had a
total area of 139 square kilometres and a maximum depth of only 2.3 metres.
Like similar “prairie pothole” lakes, this one has receded significantly in
recent years. According to one report, it lost about one quarter of its depth
between 1999 and 2009.
The lake is an important bird habitat,
and has been designated a “National Nature Viewpoint” by Nature Canada
(formerly known as the Canadian Nature Federation) in 1981. The Beavershills
Natural Area was established in 1987 to protect the lake and its surrounding
area. Beavershills Lake Heritage Rangeland Natural Area is also established on
what were the shores of the lake. The Beavershills Lake Group, a
stratigraphical unit of the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin was named for
this lake.[45]
In any given year, some 300 species
migrate to, through and/or from Alberta in the course of a year.[46]
In an important study of the Beavershills Parkland, naturalists Dick Dekker and
Edgar T. Jones report that 291 confirmed bird species had been sighted in the
park over the years, five of which were “hypothetical” in the sense that they
were reported in the early years of the 20th century and therefore
not confirmed. They cite records of 32 mammals sighted (four hypothetical), and
provide a checklist of seven fish, amphibians and reptiles. Finally, they list
35 tree, shrub and wildflower species.[47]
This is a dramatic confirmation of the importance of lakes and wetlands as
habitat within the province.
Of interest, however, the researchers
studied the area over time – in the latter 1980, and again in the early 90s, after
a period of severe drought when, compared to one of his earlier study areas, “the
main lake was literally out of sight.” To the point, however, “long-time
residents recall that it had dropped even lower during the early 1950s.
Fortunately, in 1997 snow runoff and rain brought the lake back up to a
respectable level. In the meantime, it was fascinating to observe the changes
the down-cycle brought to the ecosystem.”
As the shoreline retreated, cattails
and bulrushes disappeared with it. Mud flats “sprouted masses of seedlings, but
they too died after the water failed to come back up. “Homeless, some Black Birds
built their nests in ragwort, which grew to giant proportions. Other species
took advantage of open ground. In 1993, the rare Piping Plover returned to nests
successfully for the first time in many years. In 1996 there were six pairs,
but much of their habitat would soon be invaded by Foxtails. One or two seasons
later, it turned into a jungle of chest-high grasses, thistles and other hardy
weeds. A walk along the shore felt like an obstacle course, particularly where
cattle had pockmarked the soft ground.”
Grebes, Night Herons, and Terns
stopped breeding and went elsewhere. More than 300 pairs of pelicans and about
100 cormorants held onto their island, although they had to commute daily to
other lakes…to obtain food.” In June 1993, the researchers found the island abandoned:
“a single pelican egg remained, and the nests of cormorants contained only dead
chicks. Tracks indicated that coyotes had raided the breeding colony by
crossing the shallow channel between island and shore.”
“Affected by the vagaries and interaction of
many factors, both natural and human-related,” they wrote, “some species have
increased, such as the Raven. Others have lost ground. One of these,
unfortunately, is the Sharp-tailed Grouse.” They proposed a ban on hunting
upland birds – essentially grouse and pheasants near the lake. This “might
bring them back in the future….”[48]
To understand
how fortunate Canada is in respect to water supply, consider that natural
disasters affected almost two billion people in the last decade of the 20th
century, 86% of them by floods and droughts. Asia has the greatest annual
availability of fresh-water and Australia the lowest. But when population is
taken into account the picture looks very different. By the mid-1990s eighty
countries, which collectively were home to 40 percent of the world’s population,
encountered serious shortages of water. Africa and the Middle East have the
regions with the most serious problems.
Almost one fifth of the world’s population (about 1.2 billion people)
live in areas where water is physically scarce. One quarter of the global
population also live in developing countries that face water shortages due to a
lack of infrastructure to fetch water from rivers and aquifers. Nearly half of
the world’s population does not have drinking water piped to their premises,
and three quarters of a billion people do not have access to clean drinking
water.
The world has lost half of its wetlands since 1900, and freshwater
species face an estimated extinction rate five times greater than that of
terrestrial species. One hundred and thirty five of the world’s 227 biggest
rivers have interrupted stream flows because of dams and other infrastructure.
Interruptions in stream flow dramatically decrease downstream sediment and
nutrient transport. This reduces water quality and impairs ecosystem health.
About one third of the world’s population are without access to effective
sanitation systems, and 1.8 billion of those children, women and men live in
Asia. Every day, humanity discharges two million tons of sewage and
industrial and agricultural waste the world’s water. By weight, that’s equal to
our planet’s entire human population. One result is that 4 million people
die from water-borne diseases annually – the vast majority in Asian and African
nations. Waterborne and other infectious diseases are the number one killer of
children under five years of age.
[50]
In a world
in which many countries are deeply worried about access to clean water, Canada
is in a unique position. Among the world’s larger countries, we are number four
in terms of fresh-water resources, as the following table shows. Yet we have a
relatively small population. In per capita terms, Canadians are water-rich.[51]
Because
of glacial activity on the vast Canadian Shield during the last Ice Age, 60 per
cent of the world’s lakes are within our borders. Notably, Canada hosts 14 of
the world’s 38 largest lakes – five of them (including Lake of the Woods) on
the Canada/US border. (Lake Michigan is entirely within American territory.)
Since her earliest days, Canada has
prospered from natural resources and geography. Aboriginal groups set up their
camps along waterways and lakes – to some degree because of their reliance on
canoe transport. After contact with Europe began, French and aboriginal fur
traders earned their livelihoods with the aid of canoe transport along Canada’s
mostly northward-flowing rivers. They played a big role in the country’s
creation by taking information about resource potential from remote northern
locations to political and commercial centres like Montréal and to the HBC’s “factories,”
where the company’s “factors” exchanged trading goods for pelts. Through their
journals and maps, they created a large body of information about this vast new
territory.
The Aboriginals of today’s Canada
initially greeted white men with fear and respect, initially believing them to
be sorcerers or even all-powerful spirits. The Plains Sioux who encountered
Jesuit priest Louis Hennepin in the 1680s approached him with great caution, but
offered him food at the end of a long stick. Even earlier than that, the
Algonquin and the Iroquois had been amazed and astounded by the Europeans
because of their trade goods, and apparently magical power to make things. That
said, the almost divine status that Aboriginals accorded the Europeans rarely
lasted more than one or two seasons. They quickly realized that these
self-interested newcomers wanted primarily to get their hands on the largest
number of beaver pelts for the minimum amount of trade. Alliances among Aboriginal
peoples had developed over many centuries, based on the generosity of partners
who did not have technological advantages over other First Nations.
By contrast, Europeans had “one,
ill-concealed goal: to exploit the resources of this new land they had
discovered,” wrote Francis Back and Jean-Pierre Hardy.
“Once the Europeans’ mean-spiritedness became evident, their Indian partners
could easily, and justifiably, break off the relationship.” This had the effect
of forcing the European traders to accept “rules of the commerce based on
giving and sharing, while the Indians had to adapt to the logic of the market,
learning to play in the competition between the European powers.”
When they arrived in the New World,
the authors continued, “Europeans set off a powerful shock wave that swept
across the continent, sometimes dozens of years ahead of them.” Rumours, stories
and objects that coastal Indians had developed from their encounters swept into
the continent from its coasts, having been traded from tribe to tribe.[52]
According to Harold Innis, who in the
1920s wrote a landmark interpretation of Canada’s economic development, “The
economic history of Canada has been dominated by the discrepancy between the
centre and the margins of Western civilization. [People’s] energy has been
directed toward the exploitation of staple products and the tendency has been
cumulative. [Raw material] supplied to the mother country stimulated
manufacturers of the finished product and also of the products which were in
demand in the colony.”
He contended that “large-scale
production of raw materials was encouraged by improvement of techniques of
production, of marketing, and of transport as well as by improvement in the
manufacture of the finished product.” Therefore people in the colonies, as they
were then, “directly and indirectly” focused on developing staple commodities –
what we today would call resources. This was how Canadians became directly
involved “in the production of the staple and indirectly in the production of
facilities promoting production” he wrote. The result is that “agriculture,
industry, transportation, trade, finance, and governmental activities tend to
become subordinate to the production of the staple for a more highly
specialized manufacturing community.”[53]
The first westerner to report seeing
the oil sands in their natural state was Yankee fur trader Peter Pond. “Born in 1739, son of a Connecticut
shoemaker and descendant of an old colonial line of military men, Pond eagerly
took up arms for King George III, fighting against French forces at Ticonderoga,
Fort Niagara, and Montréal,” said historian Barry Gough in a
concise portrayal of his life. “His military campaigning led Pond to take a
favorable view of Canada and its prospects at the Peace of 1763….Of industrious
habits, and with a good common education, he was a feisty, roistering,
self-directed man who took to trading with the native people as easily as he
campaigned in wilderness military forays.” The “peace” Gough refers to involved
King George III’s Royal Proclamation of 1764, which enabled Britain to
administer North American lands which France had ceded the previous year.
Language used in the proclamation established the constitutional framework for
treaties with Aboriginal communities as “First Nations.”
Pond was “of a violent temper and
perhaps morose and quarrelsome disposition,” Gough said. It is alleged that “he
committed or plotted murder or manslaughter against other traders. Both times he
ran free in a wild world where the writ of the Crown in Canada had only paper
authority.”[54]
In a journal he wrote toward the end
of his life, Pond described in idiosyncratic spelling his participation in the
1760 victory of the British Empire over France. “We then left a garrison and
descended the river til we reacht Montreal the ondly plase the French had in
possession in Canaday. Hear we lay one night with our armes. The next day the
town sranderd to Gineral Amharst.”[55]
The Yankee fur trader was active throughout
present-day Minnesota and Wisconsin and, through business, became acquainted
with Alexander Henry the younger, Simon McTavish and the brothers Thomas,
Benjamin and Joseph Frobisher. They formed the Montréal-based North West
Company, which became a fierce competitor to HBC. In
search of new fur resources, Pond explored west of the Great Lakes. In
1776–1778 he founded and wintered at a fur post at the junction of the Sturgeon
River and North Saskatchewan River. During his explorations, he travelled down
the Clearwater River to the Athabasca.
There is little doubt that Pond saw
the oil sands. What is in doubt, however, is whether he was actually the first
non-native to view and report on their presence – and if he was, in what words.
Even Canadian historian Harold Innes attributed a passage in French to this
marginally literate man: «Ce
qu’il y a de certain, c’est que le long des bords de cette rivière et du Lac [[Athabasca]],
on trouve des sources de bitume qui coulent sur la terre.»[†] Given Pond’s appalling written English, it is
impossible to credit his speaking fluent French[56] –
especially since those of European descent and Aboriginals communicated in
patois.
Oil sands historian Joseph Fitzgerald offers
a reasonable explanation. He believes the quote originated with a Frenchman
named Michel Guillaume St. Jean de Crèvecœur, who had visited the Athabasca
country in 1785. Fitzgerald suggests that de Crèvecœur took notes on Pond’s
speculations about the country, and that this famous sentence appeared in a
biography of the Frenchman, published in 1883.
Consistent with this explanation is
that Northwestern fur traders developed a language of their own. Citing a
journey that began almost 100 years after Peter Pond‘s, Juliette Champagne quoted
expedition leaders Viscount William Milton and Dr.
Walter Cheadle as
saying “Our conversation was carried on in Canadian French, for [the guides’]
knowledge of English was very imperfect. Amongst themselves, they used a mixed
patois of French and Indian, for a long time perfectly incomprehensible to us.”
Language played
a key role in the work of missionaries, according to Champagne. French
missionaries had such a high success rate among the indigenous peoples of the
Upper North-West because the people there spoke a pidgin or creole of French,
Dené and Cree, giving Francophones access to the native languages.
A missionary at Fort Good Hope, Father Henri Grollier – he
died in 1864, aged 38 – was adamant that the people there should not speak to
him in any other language than French. There was to be no mixture of languages
for him. However his superior, Bishop Grandin, disagreed with this amateurish point of view
and saw the advantages of learning aboriginal languages. Anglophone
missionaries did not have the linguistic advantage of those who spoke French
and thus had a handicap when it came to communicating with the Native Peoples.
This contributed to the lesser success of those who tried to convert
aboriginals to Anglicanism and other Reformation creeds. It also helped that
the word was out among those of French/Indian mixed blood that the Catholic
faith was the true one, and that all the others were doomed.[57]
At least partly because of his
association with the murder of fellow fur traders Jean-Etienne Waddens and
John Ross, in the latter 1770s Pond’s “star rapidly
faded.”[58]
A decade later, though, he drew a map of the general outline of the Mackenzie
River basin,
and prepared other maps based on his explorations and on information provided
to him by First Nations peoples. While his business was the fur trade – in
1779 he came out of the Chipewyan country with 80,000 prime beaver pelts – it
was his eye-witness report on the presence of bitumen and his map-making that
secured for Pond a place in the oil sands chronicles.
His understanding of the geography of the west played a
sinister role in Canadian history, however. According to David Thompson, a contemporary of Pond and the
greatest map-maker of the era, Pond used his knowledge of western North America
to have an undue portion of the continent allocated to the newly independent
United States. “A boundary line through the middle of Lake Champlain, and
thence due west would have been accepted in the United States for it was more than
they could justly claim, had a gentleman of abilities been selected on the part
of Great Britain, but at that time North America was held in contempt,” he wrote.
To the United States commissioners Mr.
Pond designated a boundary line passing through the middle of the St. Lawrence
to Lake Superior, through that lake and the interior countries to the northwest
corner of the Lake of the Woods; and thence westward to the head of the
Missouri [Mississippi], being twice the area of the territory the States could
justly claim. This exorbitant demand the British commissioners accepted, and it
was confirmed by both nations. Such was the hand that designated the boundary
line between the dominions of Great Britain and the territories of the United
States.[59]
In the 1500s, Portugal and Spain had
taken control of the sea routes to Asia and claimed sovereignty over Latin
America. The British (and French) response was to claim and begin settling
North America. Also, Britain sought a Northwest Passage to gain
access to Asian markets. This context helps explain the activities of Alexander
Mackenzie, whom the Montréal-based North West Company sent
west to become Pond’s successor. From Pond he learned that, according to
Aboriginals, local rivers flowed to the northwest and he got fired up with the
idea of going on this northern expedition. Pond impetuously left the company
the following year, perhaps because he wanted to devote his final years to
exploration.
Before he left for Montréal, Pond had
been the victim of back-stabbing of the metaphorical variety – notably from
Mackenzie himself, who outwardly maligned the idea of following the great river
north. However, it is worth remembering that Pond was the original proponent of
the notion of seeking the North West Passage by this
route. In 1790 Pond sold his interest in the Northwest Company for £800 and
returned to Milford, Connecticut. Innis speculates that his retirement may have
been prompted by news of Mackenzie’s voyage, which disproved his theory about
the Northwest Passage. In 1807 he died in poverty.
Mackenzie
had full authority to manage the North West Company‘s local affairs, and
to reorganize “the posts of the area, and complete freedom to undertake his
mission into unknown parts. Free of the pressing executive obligations that had
pinned him down for a decade, [Mackenzie] was released to pursue the Northwest
Passage.” Mackenzie’s star “glowed ever brighter.”[60]
The notion that the tributaries of that area gathered into a
great river possibly flowing to the Northwest Passage had fired him up, and
after Pond returned to Montréal the Scottish-born adventurer followed the river
to its mouth. This basin provides access by canoe to the lands that eventually
became Western Canada.
Although map-makers named the river after Mackenzie, he was
not the first European to explore it. Between 1754-5 HBC adventurer Anthony “Henday”
canoed from York Factory on Hudson Bay to present-day Alberta. He was on a
trading expedition, and the paying guest of a party of Assiniboine and Cree
Indians. He almost certainly saw bitumen deposits on his travels, but made no
reference to them in his journals. His descriptions of Aboriginal life and game
hunting, however, are fascinating. According to an annotated release of his
journal (1973), his surname was almost certainly Hendry, not Henday.
In 1792, Mackenzie set out again to find a route to the
Pacific. This time he took a series of tributaries to the Peace River,
wintering in what became known as Fort Fork. The following year he crossed the
Great Divide, then reached an inlet to the Pacific Ocean. He had thus commanded
two epochal expeditions: the first by a European from the interior of the
continent to the Arctic and the first expedition across North America north of
Mexico.
In published reports of his two expeditions, Mackenzie
provided a great deal of information about the Aboriginal peoples he
encountered, including their dress and customs – frequently deriding the “superstitions”
of the locals. His lively account also presents detailed descriptions of
geographical features he chanced upon during his ground-breaking adventure. His
lively report presented a wealth of information about his travels and sold well
in Britain and America’s eastern seaboard. Today, the most widely quoted
passage from his book has to do with the oil sands. “At about twenty-four miles
from the Fork, are some bitumenous fountains; into which a pole of twenty feet
long may be inserted without the least resistance,” he wrote. “The bitumen is
in a fluid state, and when mixed with gum or the resinous substance collected
from the Spruce Fir, serves to gum the canoes. In its heated state
it emits a smell like that of Sea Coal. The banks of the river, which are there
very elevated, discover veins of the same bitumenous quality.”[61]
Since European trade in British North America
began, Canada has prospered from natural resources and geography. She did not
become what she is despite her geographic structures, but because of them.
McKenzie’s exploration describes how
the struggle for control of the fur trade influenced more than Canada’s borders,
of course. It also puts in context “aboriginal goals and strategies,
mercantilist economic thought, European imperial struggles on a global scale,
the changing economic fortunes of England and France, and Canadian
entrepreneurship,” as Arthur Ray summed matters up.[62]
Innis wrote that the trade in staple
products like fish and fur, then timber and mineral resources, characterize “an
economically weak country.” One outcome – clearly apparent in the 1920s, was
that Canadian businesses consisted to a large degree of exporters focused on
selling resources to Europe and the United States. Besides encouraging business
to develop around the export market, these developments led to “various
peculiar tendencies in Canadian development,” he wrote. “The maintenance of
connections with Europe, at first with France and later with Great Britain, has
been a result. The diversity of institutions which attended this relationship
has made for greater elasticity in organization and for greater tolerance among
her peoples. This elasticity of institutions facilitated the development of the
compromise which evolved into responsible government and the British Empire.”
“The fur trade permitted the extension
of the combination of authority and independence across the northern half of
the continent,” he said, and business structures “shifted from the elastic
organization characteristic of the Northwest Company along the St. Lawrence from
the Atlantic to the Pacific, to the more permanent organization from Hudson
Bay. The diversity of institutions has made possible the combination of
government ownership and private enterprise which is been a further
characteristic of Canadian development.”
Countless hats and fortunes came from
the beaver pelt, which played a key role in the development of Canada’s history
and even her borders. “The importance of staple exports to Canadian economic
development began with the fishing industry but more conspicuously on the
continent with the fur trade,” he wrote. Canada’s borders were “a result of the
dominance of furs. The exploitation of lumber in the more accessible areas
followed the decline of furs.”
The geographic unity of Canada which
resulted from the fur trade became less noticeable with the introduction of
capitalism and the railroads. Her economic development has been one of gradual
adjustment of machine industry to the framework incidental to the fur trade.
The sudden growth occasioned by the production of wheat and the development of
subsequent staples in the Canadian Shield have been the result of machine
industry.”[63]
The first known reference to trade in bitumen
comes from a letter from W.L. Hardisty of the
Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Simpson. Dated 1872 and addressed to Mr. Gaudet at Fort
Good Hope, the letter said “I shall require 5 kegs of good clean tar from you,
for Fort Simpson, and 1 keg for Peels River, to be sent down by the spring
boat.”[64] To drive from Fort Simpson to Fort McMurray
is a 1,637-kilometre, 19-hour drive along the McKenzie Highway. This gives a
sense of the strength and resilience of early traders making their living in
Canada’s North.
There are other records of bitumen trade from that
era. For example, Juliette Champagne – a historian who specializes in
French-language material – cites an 1878 letter from Bishop Henri Faraud, who
wanted what he described as “a barrel or two of the tar that could be obtained
from the fine tar sands beyond Fort McMurray.” Faraud’s headquarters were in
Lac la Biche, so he did not have easy access to bitumen. His mission used the
Athabasca River to bring freight to the North, and larger canoes needed tar to
stay afloat.
The minor bitumen deposits near his
headquarters “were very sandy and would take weeks of boiling in special
kettles to purify,” she wrote. “Tar was always in short supply for use on the
barges, and year after year the same requests occur” because bitumen was
essential for boats and barges. In exchange for the little favours, “Faraud
usually sent a little gift which would please, but that year he lacked a small
barrel to send wine.”[65]
Two years later, according to
Champagne, when he was “returning from his Northern Missions, he managed to
collect some tar from the ‘spring on the way’, but lost it and other supplies
when they cracked their canoe in rapids south of Fort MacMurray [sic].” She
added that they were paddling a canot du maître [master canoe], which George Simpson once had
used. It was “rather amazing that it could have lasted so many years, as
Simpson had retired at least 30 years before.”[66]
Bishop Alexandre Taché had
descended the river in 1856 in a canot du
nord [a northern canoe, which was smaller than the canot du maître], but
these small vessels were clearly not for serious freighting. In 1864, Bishop
Faraud had a boat built and christened Aurora. It was their first. The HBC had
not used the Athabasca since losing two fully loaded and manned canoes many
years before and considered the river impassable. But in 1864 the company “sent
a boat fully loaded with 25 barrels of salt along with the Aurora from Fort
Chipewyan to test the waters, so to speak,” Champagne wrote. The two boats were
to return together, but there was a delay on the part of the mission. The
Hudson’s Bay Company’s boatmen became increasingly agitated about the lowering
of the water level in the La Biche River, so they left on July 22nd. The Aurora finally left August 3rd, making
the return trip alone. “The boat scraped her keel while passing some rapids,
giving the passengers a good scare, and their trip took 18 days.” The HBC
eventually lent the mission a carpenter to build boats on site.[67]
In a book based on Jesuit Father
Joseph Le Treste’s memoirs, Juliette Champagne brings some humour to the oil
sands story when she describes a run-in with the oil sands the priest had
during the war. In 1915, Le Treste used a small boat with an outboard motor to
take Bishop Gabriel Breynat to Fort McMurray from the Nativité Mission at Fort
Chipewyan. Along the way they lost the boat’s propeller in the Athabasca River,
but managed to find a replacement. On his return to Fort Chipewyan, Le Treste
stopped to collect tar, because “the brothers of the mission of the Nativité
Mission much wanted some to caulk their skiffs and boats.”
“I had no difficulty in filling a
vessel with four gallons of tar,” he wrote. “But I had no tools, so I used my
hands like spades,” without concern for what would follow. “Coated with a thick
layer of tar, my hands became massive and my fingers inseparable.” To extricate
himself, Le Treste scrubbed himself with “water and sand, but in vain. My
position got a bit comical, and greatly amused my companion,” he wrote.
Fortunately, need is the mother of
invention. “Remembering that we had gasoline, I asked Victor to pour some on my
hands, thinking it might be the specific cure for this embarrassing case. I was
not mistaken…that thick tarry layer broke away and disappeared completely.
Again I could row and move freely.”[68]
Canada’s
history is closely related to the presence and flows of her lakes and rivers.
Exploration
and development were largely along water transportation routes, and the early
fur and timber trades were river oriented. Water transport dominated early
commerce. Canal development made movement possible far into the continent and
canal transportation remains important today. Farm irrigation was and is a
major factor in agricultural development in the drier southwestern areas of the
Prairie Provinces and in the southern interior of BC, and supplemental
irrigation is expanding into more humid areas. Waterpower and, later,
hydroelectric site developments were major bases for industrial development.
Within this context, Alberta has
its own unique water systems. The province has only two per cent of Canada’s fresh
water supply, yet in drier years the province is responsible for more than 50
per cent of Canada’s consumptive demand. To explain, consumptive water use
refers to consumption of water that diminishes the source at the point
of
appropriation.
More than half of Canada’s irrigated land and most of her secondary recovery of
the oil and gas (involving the pumping of water into geological formations to
replace these fuels) are in Alberta. Substantial expansion of bitumen development,
involving evaporation of large quantities of water from the tailings ponds,
might increase Alberta’s share of Canadian consumptive demand. The problem is
accentuated since almost all of the irrigation, urban and industrial demand and
some of the mining demand is in Southern Alberta, while most (87 per cent) of
the water supply is in the North, draining into Hudson Bay or the Gulf of
Mexico). Moreover, by agreement with the governments of Saskatchewan, Manitoba
and Canada, one half of Alberta’s southern flow is allocated for downstream
use. In the near future, dry-year demand may exceed supply and political
pressure for massive inter-basin transfers is growing.[69]
As
European and American settlers arrived in Alberta – speeded up by the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad
(CPR) – they initially used simple mechanical systems to divert water for
irrigation from streams and rivers. In the 20th century, electric and
hydraulic systems greatly increased the sophistication and efficiency of agriculture.
The mean annual basin yields of Alberta’s 14 river
basins, in millions of cubic metres, are as follows[70]:
Most of these basins drain in a north-easterly
direction, with four major rivers collecting the water. Peace and Athabasca
River are heading north and draining in the Arctic Ocean while North and South
Saskatchewan River are heading east and draining in Lake Winnipeg and Hudson
Bay. The smaller Beaver River in east-central Alberta flows into the Churchill
system and then Hudson Bay, while the southern Milk River heads south-east into
the Missouri River and to the Gulf of Mexico. This is because of a historical
curiosity which took place as the United States and Great Britain were drawing
up boundaries between the two countries, negotiations which were finally
completed in 1818.
The controversy goes back to the
Treaty of Utrecht, which was signed in 1713 as the line separating French
possessions in Western Canada and Louisiana to the south, and British
territories which had been assigned to the Hudson’s Bay Company in the North.
When the French sold their North American territories to the United States in
1818 – an event known to history as America’s Louisiana Purchase – the agreed border
was the 49th parallel.
While the survey crews that eventually
firmed up the border in that pre-GPS age created a border that was anything but
a straight line, given the tools of the day they did not do a bad job. But the
geography of the area was such that the Milk River became “the only river in
Canada to flow into the Gulf of Mexico drainage basin,” explained John Dormaar
in a well-researched study. This is because both the North Milk River and the
Milk River rise in the eastern slopes of Glacier National Park, Montana. “Although
the Milk River has its source in the United States and indeed does flow
northeast into Canada, it eventually returned southeast to the United States to
join the Missouri River near Fort Peck, Montana.” Thus the convention of 1818 arbitrarily
divided a significant and interesting natural ecological area between Alberta
and Montana.[71]
International politics and conventions
were thus behind this excellent outcome for the province of Alberta. A
significant portion of Alberta’s Milk River basin has been turned into
Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park, because over time a variety of Aboriginal
groups and others carved petroglyphs of many kinds into the areas sandstone
cliffs. In this small area there is more rock art in anywhere else in Alberta –
indeed, anywhere else in the Great Plains. It isn’t clear why but, Dormaar wrote,
“at Writing-on-Stone we have a sacred landscape if one takes together the River,
the strange hoodoo outcrops, the maze of cliffs, nooks and crannies, and the
overpowering presence of the Sweetgrass hills to the south as one package.
These hills are one of the most powerful locations within the sacred geography
of the Blackfoot.”[72]
A landmark year was 1670. That is when King
Charles II issued a “grant” (in effect, articles of incorporation) for the
Company of Gentlemen Adventurers Trading into Hudson Bay. The grant went to his
cousin, Prince Rupert, and a small group of Rupert’s business associates. Today
known as the Hudson’s Bay Company or The Bay, that organization’s charter
provided for a monopoly over trade in the lands fed by rivers flowing into
Hudson Bay. The equivalent of 40 per cent of modern Canada that vast territory
was known as Rupert’s Land until after Confederation. It was history’s largest
private commercial empire.
To manage such a huge trading area
required a well-capitalized organization (the Bay’s initial capital was
£10,500) and permanent business operations. Before the creation of the Bay and
a few other seventeenth century trading companies, British “venturers” had
generally financed each business expedition (for example, the voyage of a
trading vessel) separately. The Bay thus represented a new, continuous approach
to enterprise, and reflected an important advance in the business entity.
Alberta’s most southerly river systems
are part of the Hudson Bay watershed, although water from the northern
two-thirds of the province flows into the Mackenzie River Basin. The Mackenzie
drains into the Beaufort Sea. However, Aboriginals from all of present-day
Alberta quickly developed trade routes to Hudson’s Bay Company “factories.” The
Bay’s factories were trading posts at which Aboriginals and the British
exchanged pelts for such manufactured goods as axes, beads, broadcloth, brandy,
knives, guns, lead and gunpowder. This commerce usually required long,
strenuous and frequently dangerous journeys by canoe through white-water rivers
and the muskeg of the Canadian Shield.
The beaver pelt was the common
currency in these transactions. Early factory books recorded transactions
according to “Goods Expended p. Weight Value into Beavor [sic] Amounts” and “Goods
Expended p. Number Value into Beavor amounts.” For a century and a half, the
standard of currency was the “Made-beaver” — a prime quality skin from an adult
animal.
It was to the Bay’s York Factory (in
the northeast of today’s Manitoba, on the shores of Hudson Bay) that accounting
in Alberta can trace its symbolic roots. In an entry to his log on June 12,
1719, the trading post’s “factor,” Henry Kelsey, wrote that a man named
Wa-Pa-Sun had brought him a sample “of that Gum or pitch that flows out of the
Banks of the River.” The Cree warrior had delivered a sample of bitumen from a
seep along one of northeastern Alberta’s rivers.
Why is this incident significant to
Alberta’s accounting profession? First, the fact that this indigenous man possessed
a sample of bitumen leaves little doubt that he was trading fur from
present-day Alberta. And the trading results of that expedition were dutifully
noted in the accounts delivered to the Bay’s head office in London. For the
first time, in other words, goods known to have originated in today’s Alberta
formally entered a bookkeeper’s ledger.
This episode has a second level of
historical significance. The delivery of that sample to a British explorer,
diarist, trader and bookkeeper led to the first written record of Alberta’s
Athabasca oil sand deposit — the world’s second largest hydrocarbon resource,
and today the source of 15 per cent of Canadian oil production. As we shall
see, Alberta accountants would make substantial contributions to the practice
and theory of oil and gas accounting.
For 100 years after Kelsey’s encounter
with Wa-Pa-Sun, traders of European origin ventured progressively farther into
Western Canada to increase the trade in pelts. They established trading posts
throughout the northern portion of the continent. While these men were known
collectively as coureurs des bois (“runners of the woods”) because so many came
from Québec, many also hailed from Scotland, Ireland, the United States and
British colonies in North America. The most famous of them all was a Scot,
Alexander Mackenzie.
The first European to cross North
America from east to west and the first to travel the Mackenzie River to its
terminus at the Beaufort Sea, Mackenzie was a key shareholder in the Montréal-based
North West Company. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, that company
engaged in a fierce trade war with the Bay. The sometimes-violent conflict was
resolved in 1821, when the two companies combined.
The new entity kept the Bay’s name,
but increasingly moved its trade to England through the Great Lakes and the St.
Lawrence River, rather than through the drainage systems that flow into Hudson
Bay. Some 65 years later, the St. Lawrence trading system would be extended by
rail to the Pacific. And that trading system — it stretched from Québec City to
Vancouver — would become the backbone of Canada as a modern state. The
implication, of course, is that Canada was constructed upon a trade route – a
route that was extended by many thousands of miles in the 1880s by a visionary
railroad. Commerce is at the core of the nation.
England and other
European states issued monopoly charters for more than a century. The purpose
of this practice was to encourage European trade and territorial expansion.
Serving as the original articles of incorporation of Hudson’s Bay Company, the company’s
Royal Charter set forth the framework for its governance – by a committee of
seven, headed by a governor and a deputy governor – as well as, for
example, the frequency of elections and meetings. In it the King names his “dear
and entirely beloved cousin” Prince Rupert as the first governor of the
territory, henceforth to be known as “Rupert’s Land.”
The charter gave
the Company control of all lands whose rivers and streams drain into Hudson Bay
- all told an area comprising over 1.5 million square miles, stretching from
Labrador in the east as far west as the Canadian Rocky Mountains and well south
of the present U.S/Canada border. It represented more than 40 per cent of
modern Canada.[73] Today, of course, Alberta is
a small part of the original grant. Only the rivers in the southerly half of
the province flow to the northeast, ultimately emptying into Hudson Bay.
Three years
after Confederation, the government of Canada acquired Rupert’s Land from the
Hudson’s Bay Company for $1.5-million. In terms of the amount of land acquired,
this was the largest real estate transaction (by land area) in the country’s history.
The North-Western Territory was a
region of British North America until 1870. Named for its whereabouts relative
to Rupert’s Land, the territory at its greatest extent covered what is now
Yukon, the mainland Northwest Territories, northwestern Nunavut, northwestern
Saskatchewan, northern Alberta and northern British Columbia. Some of this area
should properly have been part of Rupert’s Land. It ended up in the NWT because
of inaccurate maps.
The
map illustrates how Alberta’s southerly rivers – with the exception of the Milk
River – flow east by northeast toward a vast system of lakes in central
Manitoba. Ultimately, these systems drain into Hudson Bay through the Nelson
River.
Yet the longest river in Canada is the Mackenzie, which covers
a distance of around 1,800 kilometres. It begins at Great Slave Lake in the
Northwest Territories and flows north into the Arctic Ocean, discharging 306
cubic kilometres of water per year (including 100 million tons of sediment). It
is the main stem of the second largest river system in North America (after the
Mississippi-Missouri watershed). It is the fourth largest of all river systems
discharging into the Arctic Ocean; the three largest are in Russia. The entire
system extends 4,250 kilometres and drains 1.8 million sq. km. It includes
three major lakes (Great Slave, Great Bear and Athabasca) and numerous major
rivers (such as the Peace, Athabasca, Liard, Hay, Peel, South Nahanni and Slave
rivers).[74]
The rivers in Alberta’s northerly
watershed empty into the Beaufort Sea via the Peace and Mackenzie rivers. The
Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories is a historic waterway, used for
millennia by the original Dene as a travel and hunting corridor. It is part of
a larger watershed that includes the Slave, Athabasca, and Peace rivers
extending from northern Alberta.[75]
The first permanent European settlement
in Alberta put its roots down in 1795, with the founding of Fort Edmonton, near
present-day Fort Saskatchewan. In the early 19th century, HBC moved the fort to
near what today is the site of the Alberta Legislature. The fort served as
headquarters for the Hudson’s Bay Company’s North American fur trade operations
in the vast Saskatchewan District of Rupert’s Land. The first settlement
outside the fort was in the 1870s, with pioneer farmers living in log cabins
along the river. These farms formed the structure for the 1882 survey of the
land into “River lots”.
“1885
Street” at Fort Edmonton Park represents the early hamlet of Edmonton. The Town
of Edmonton was established in 1894. The town encompassed modern Boyle Street
(the original downtown) and McCauley neighbourhoods. The first outpost of The
Hudson’s Bay Company was named Edmonton House in honour of the Company’s Deputy
Governor Sir James Winter Lake’s manor in a town in England of the same name.
In 1870, the Hudson’s Bay Company had
been granted a reserve on much of the present downtown, but by 1913, the peak
of the World War I land price inflationary boom, it was all sold off. Edmonton
got its first railway in 1903 when a branch-line from Calgary via southside
Strathcona was built to cross the Low Level Bridge. Edmonton became a city in
1904 and shortly after, with a mere 5,000 people became Alberta’s capital. With
the new land west of Queens Avenue (modern 100 St) available to the city, the
city grew tremendously, and Boyle Street was abandoned as the downtown for the
new, current downtown. Many new communities like Glenora, Highlands, and
Westmount were built in this time as the economy started to gain momentum. And
during the early 1910s, Edmonton grew very rapidly, causing rising speculation
in real estate prices. In 1912, Edmonton amalgamated with the city of
Strathcona, south of the North Saskatchewan River; as a result, the city
extended south of the river.[76]
The Peace River system was the western arm of the complex.
Travellers to the Peace would pack or ride Red River carts from Fort Edmonton
eighty miles north to Athabaska Landing. Boats bound for the Peace would travel
north on the Athabasca River to Lake Athabasca. From the mouth of the Peace,
they could turn southwest again. The mighty Peace flows from the Rocky
Mountains in British Columbia to the Peace-Athabasca Delta near Fort Chipewyan,
thence into the large Lake Athabasca, which Alberta and Saskatchewan share.
It is unclear exactly when Great
Britain first asserted sovereignty over the territory; however, after France
accepted British sovereignty over the Hudson Bay coast by the Treaty of Utrecht
(1713), Great Britain was the only European power with practical access to that
part of the continent. Long before Britain assigned governance of the
North-Western Territory to the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1859, the company used
the region as part of its trading area. In the 1780s, Peter Pond began trading
furs with the Athapascan-speaking Dene of the rivers.
In 1789, Alexander Mackenzie was the
first European to travel and map the river, following its torrent to the Arctic
Ocean. The watershed thus became a vital part of the fur trade. At that time
the river was the only communication link between northern trading posts and
the south. Water travel increased in the late 19th century as traders,
dominated primarily by the Hudson’s Bay Company, looked to increase water
travel along the Mackenzie.
A Hudson’s Bay Company sternwheeler steamer, the SS Grahame, made its first trips on the
Athabasca and Clearwater Rivers in 1884 marking the arrival of sternwheeler
travel to the area. The trip from Athabasca to Fort McMurray was both
adventurous and dangerous. First scows and, later, paddle steamers had to
traverse the Grand Rapids.
The Canadian Northern Railway arrived in Edmonton in 1905.
In 1919, rail reached Lynton and pushed through to “Old Waterways” (now called
Draper) in 1921. Rail service from Lac La Biche and Waterways was largely built
across muskeg – an unstable material which led to frequent derailments.
Another
1921 milestone was Imperial Oil’s decision to fly two all-metal, 185-horsepower
Junkers airplanes to the Norman Wells oilfield, which is also located on the
McKenzie River. The story behind this event goes back to Alexander Mackenzie’s
1789 exploration of the river, and his observation of oil seeps.
In 1911, northern
businessman Jim Cornwall also saw oil on the river and hired a local Indian
named Karkesee to look for seepages. Karkesee found several, from which
Cornwall collected samples. Analysis found it to be a high-quality light crude,
rather than bitumen.
Cornwall formed a syndicate with two Calgary businessmen and
the group engaged T.O. Bosworth, a prominent petroleum geologist, to study the
area. During his 1914 study, Bosworth staked three claims on behalf of his
backers and reported enthusiastically on the area’s prospects. The outbreak of
World War I put a halt to plans for development. By the end of the war,
Imperial Oil owned the Bosworth claims, which were near the Arctic Circle, high
up north on the river.
During the Second World War, Norman Wells gained importance
as a source of oil for military operations in Alaska and the Yukon. When Japan
captured two of the Aleutian Islands, Americans grew concerned about the safety
of their oil-tanker routes to Alaska. They began looking for an inland supply
of oil, safe from attack. The United States and Canada negotiated to build a
refinery at Whitehorse, Yukon, with crude oil to be supplied by pipeline from
Norman Wells. This spectacular project took twenty months. Construction
involved, 25,000 men, eleven million tonnes of equipment, 1,600 kilometres of
road, 1,600 kilometres of telegraph line and 2,575 kilometres of pipeline.
Dubbed Canol, the name was a contraction of either “Canadian oil” or, more
likely, “Canadian American Norman Oil Line.” Estimates of the project’s cost
range up to $300 million, in as-spent dollars.
The pipeline network consisted of the 950-kilometre crude
oil line from Norman Wells to Whitehorse and three lines to carry products to
Skagway and Fairbanks, Alaska, and Watson Lake, Yukon.[77]
The purpose of the Canol road and pipeline project was to
enable the piping of oil to Whitehorse, with the flow starting in 1944.
Although Norman Wells crude was light and flowed easily at temperatures as low
as −62 °C, the line did not work well and was shut down shortly after the war
ended.
In 1886, the S.S. Wrigley was launched on the other side of these rapids, at
Fort Smith, and for the first time a steam-driven vessel operated on the
Mackenzie River as far as Aklavik in the river delta – just before it spilled
into the Arctic Ocean. A series of small portage trails enabled travellers to
skirt the 26-kilometre rapids between Smith’s Landing (later Fort Fitzgerald)
and Fort Smith. In the 1920s, upgrades made this into a full road.
In the summer of 1898, many
adventurers left Edmonton in the hopes of making it to the Klondike Gold Rush,
which had become an international obsession the year before. The idea was to go
north down the Mackenzie, then take a variety of rivers and land routes to get
to the Klondike. A few were successful on this journey. The vast majority
simply gave up.[78]
During the next few summers, these waterways
were busy. Many new vessels plied the Athabasca and Mackenzie Rivers. In 1908,
the Hudson’s Bay Company launched the S.S.
Mackenzie, the river’s first steam-powered shallow-draught sternwheeler. In
the 1920s, police, church missions, government agents, oil and mining
companies, prospectors, and competing fur trade interests descended on the
Territories. As a result, water transportation boomed. The Hudson’s Bay Company,
Lamson & Hubbard Trading Company, Alberta & Arctic Transportation Co.,
and Northern Traders Company each operated a fleet of steam vessels.
A series of amalgamations and
takeovers left only two main water operators after 1924: the HBC and Northern
Traders Co. which later became the Northern Transportation Company Limited
(NTCL) in the 1930s. The HBC continued in the business of transportation in
conjunction with serving its own posts through Mackenzie River Transport, until
1947 when it got out of public freighting. The S.S. Distributor, built in 1920 by Lamson & Hubbard, was the
flagship of the HBC on the Mackenzie River for more than 20 years. Communities
such as Waterways (now Fort McMurray) and Fort Smith served as shipyards along
the Athabasca and Slave Rivers.
Diesel and gasoline-powered tug boats replaced
steam-driven vessels in the 1930s and 1940s. The Northern Transportation
Company Limited inaugurated a new fleet of steel-hull, diesel tugs in 1937, and
the Hudson’s Bay Company and its transportation arm, Mackenzie River Transport
Limited, got out of the common carrier business in 1947. The last
steam-propelled sternwheelers, the S.S.
Distributor and S.S. Mackenzie, retired
around that time.
The Mackenzie Highway, built between
1945 and 1948, originally ran from Grimshaw, Alberta, through to Hay River,
NWT. The highway followed a winter road cut through the bush in the spring of
1939 to Hay River in order to supply the gold fields across Great Slave Lake at
Yellowknife. The westward section around the southwestern end of Great Slave
Lake to Wrigley on the Mackenzie River was built between 1972 and 1976, but not
completed until 1994.
Eighty kilometres northwest of
Enterprise, a ferry connects with the highway to Yellowknife, and connecting
roads to the east serve Fort Resolution and Fort Smith. The section from
Enterprise to Hay River is now a separate highway. First built as an
all-weather road, some of its length has been paved. With a total length of
about 1,200 kilometres, the Mackenzie Highway is the principal land route into
the NWT.[79]
With its construction, the importance of the Athabasca-Slave River route
dwindled. Operations for Northern
Transportation Company Ltd. focused in
Hay River in the 1970s. The northern barge traffic is still essential to the
heavy freight as fuel, food, and heavy equipment can be moved economically in
the summer months to communities along the Mackenzie River and oil fields of
the Beaufort Sea.
Established as a trading post by Peter
Pond of the North West Company in 1788, Fort Chipewyan is one of the oldest
European settlements in Alberta. The fort was named after the Chipewyan people
living in the area. In a masterful book on the community, academic Patricia
McCormick describes the northern town in 1909. “The flotilla of steamboats and scows
at Fort Chipewyan and Athabasca Landing made it possible to import a plethora
of attractive trade goods and reduce the backbreaking labour associated with
transporting furs upriver to Athabasca Landing, at least for the Hudson’s Bay
Company.”[80]
In the late nineteenth century and the
early twentieth, steamboats paddled from the Rocky Mountain falls at Hudson’s
Hope to Fort Vermilion, where there was another set of rapids. Other steamboats
plied the lower Peace below the rapids from Vermilion to Lake Athabasca. The
Peace is part of the Mackenzie Basin, a vast river complex which includes the
Athabasca, Slave, and Mackenzie Rivers. At Grand Rapids and Fort Smith, large
rapids made travel by these vessels impossible, so that river too was sectional,
with boats working upper and lower sections.
Steamboats provided transport to move
food and supplies in and wheat and livestock out the 800 kilometres of the
Peace and the 400 kilometres of the Athabasca. The Catholic mission at Dunvegan
ran the first sternwheeler, the St. Charles, in 1902. Built for Bishop Émile
Grouard, her primary purpose was to aid him in his missionary work. She also
carried goods for the North-West Mounted Police and the Hudson’s Bay Company.
In 1905, the HBC launched a sternwheeler named the Peace River. Built at Fort
Vermilion, this 34-metre vessel could carry about 36,000 kilos of freight, and
worked on the Peace for ten years.
Trips up and down the river would take
several weeks, depending on conditions and sand bars. Steamboats had a limited
season, often making only making three or four trips a year before winter cold
made the rivers impassable. Boats did not travel at night due to limited
visibility. Wood was the traditional fuel, and these sternwheelers could burn
as much as three or four cords of wood per hour. Paying passengers had no
guarantee of a leisurely trip; although contractors were hired to cut and stack
cordwood along the river, the sternwheelers often burned wood in such enormous
quantities that the passengers would be called into service and set ashore with
crosscuts and axes to replenish the supply.
Development came late in the Peace
River country, which opened up to settlers about 1910. However, steamboats
quickly followed. To illustrate their rise and fall, it is worth considering
the steamship D.A Thomas. Soon to become Baron Rhondda of Wales, Thomas funded
construction of the 51-metre leviathan in 1915.
A British Isles coal baron, Thomas wanted to exploit the coal and oil deposits of
Chetwynd, a district in the Rocky Mountains of northeastern British Columbia, near the
headwaters of the Peace. To a large
degree, the venture failed because the First World War fundamentally altered
the pattern of settlement in the area. Many of the British men already in
Canada joined the Allied forces, and the war itself slowed in-migration to a
trickle. There was little industrial development in the western provinces
during the war. Although strapped for labour, existing mines could meet new
demand.
The war over, the D.A. Thomas steamed up and down the Peace until the late 1920s, but
the expansion of rail into the area finally rendered her uneconomic and
obsolete. In June 1930 she took the drop over the Vermilion Chutes, suffering
some damage on the rocks, and then limped on to Fort Fitzgerald. There, she was
dismantled and scrapped with parts being used for other purposes, including
storing grain. [81]
The arrival of the Model T Ford,
bulldozers and gravelled roads finished the river steamers in the Peace River
Block. Also, the Edmonton, Dunvegan and British Columbia Railway worked its way
to BC and arrived in Dawson Creek in 1930, completely doing in the steamboat
era. Farther east the Alberta and Great Waterways Railway bypassed the worst
rapids on the Upper Athabasca River by rail and thus made Waterways, or modern
Fort McMurray, the transport head for the Peace and Athabasca Rivers. Other
Railways—the Central Canada and Pembina Valley—tried to alleviate transport
woes but became weakened by the Depression and were not completed.
Smaller boats of various kinds
continued to work on the Peace for another 20 years, but the age of steamboats
was gone. The final commercial freight run up the Peace River was made by the
Watson Lake, a steel-hulled vessel, in September 1952. Her last trip completed,
she was hauled out of the water and loaded on a flatcar and shipped by rail to
Waterways to continue work up north. The US Army built a diesel paddler for tug
service on the Peace River in 1942 as part of the war effort. The vessel worked
on the raising of the Peace River Bridge, which was part of Alaska Highway
construction.
As settlers
poured into Canada’s west, they established farms and the growing villages,
towns and cities. They tapped shallow aquifers for well water, yet
simultaneously constructed outhouses on their property. One result was the
spread of disease, and the need for technologies to provide clean water.
Individual landowners responded with the introduction of indoor plumbing
and the installation of septic tanks and, where groundwater was unreliable,
cisterns to store rainwater. Towns and cities developed increasingly
sophisticated waterworks and sewage treatment facilities.
At this writing, though, one-third of Canada’s First Nations residents
consume water that threatens their health because of water systems from obtain
water from high risk treatment plants and pipe networks.
[82]
The report specifically cites three reserves in Alberta as having the most
hazardous water supplies: Beaver Lake 131; Ermineskin Cree Nation and Saddle
Lake Cree Nation.
“Location, location, location” is the real estate agent’s mantra, and it
has always been so. As with so most of the world’s cities, access to water
determined Calgary’s water location. For centuries Aboriginals had been
attracted to the meeting point of the Bow and Elbow Rivers. During the harsh
prairie winters, the swift-flowing Bow River – fed by meltwater from glaciers
in what is now Banff national Park – did not freeze completely. Here bison came
to winter, and humans followed in search of food, water and shelter.
Settlers and missionaries arrived in the early 1870s, followed by the
North West Mounted Police in the summer of 1875. Even the name given to the
fort the following year – Calgary – is connected to water, both historically
and etymologically. Named for Calgary Bay on Scotland’s Isle of Mull, Calgary
was long believed to be Gaelic for “clear, running water.” Linguistic research
later revealed that meaning as “Bay Farm” or “preserve pasture at the harbour.”
[83]
In the middle of the nineteenth century, railroads financed by British
capital began transporting people and goods in central Canada and the Maritime
colonies. Nova Scotia had a flourishing shipping industry, but the other
colonial economies were mostly based on agriculture and the export of raw
materials to the British Isles. The North American colonies felt reasonably
secure in the shadow of Britain’s economic and naval might.
[84]
This outlook changed with the American Civil War. During that terrible
conflict, British sentiment favoured the Confederacy. This gave a boost to the
doctrine of Manifest Destiny, the belief among Americans that the destiny of
the United States was to govern the entire continent. After its 1865 victory,
the Union did not quickly decommission its large armies. Many eyes in the
republic were looking north.
As the bloodshed was ending, Upper and Lower Canada (Ontario and Québec)
made an appeal to England. A political coalition asked Whitehall to create out
of Britain’s North American colonies a sovereign country with close ties to
London. Westminster responded with the British North America Act. Confederation
united Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Québec and Ontario in 1867.
Led by Sir John A. Macdonald, a Conservative, the newly minted federal
government began a grand project to combine British North America into a
governable whole. The chosen vehicle for the western portion of this
undertaking was a railroad that would connect the commercial centres of Québec
and Ontario with British Columbia and points between. That railway was the
Canadian Pacific (CP).
In late 1869, Canada’s federal government acquired the Hudson’s Bay
Company lands in Western Canada. Manitoba and the colony of British Columbia
entered Confederation the following year, and Prince Edward Island in 1873. To
maintain order and assert sovereignty over the new western territory, in 1873
Ottawa created the Northwest Mounted Police (today the RCMP). In Canada’s
prairies, law and order therefore preceded settlement — quite unlike much of
the experience in the American frontiers.
To tie a ribbon of steel from Canada’s commercial heartland to her
western coast, the federal government used land grants and other concessions to
encourage the creation of Canadian Pacific, a railway to the Pacific coast.
That enormous enterprise, which arrived in today’s Alberta in 1883 and was
joined to the coast three years later, removed the major impediments to
settlement in Canada’s west.
Before the
coming of the railroad, small numbers of settlers had arrived in Alberta by
canoe, horseback and cart. Their numbers stood at only about 1,000 in 1881. Ten
years later, the non-Indigenous population had increased to some 17,500.
By the time the Canadian
Pacific Railway reached the
young community in August 1883, Calgary’s population had swelled to about 400.
A little over a year later, on November 12, 1884, this boom town of tents,
shacks and log cabins was incorporated as the town of Calgary. “The railway
contributed first to the flourishing of a cattle kingdom in the West; later, to
its disintegration. In 1882 surveyors staked a line across the prairies,
avoiding the deep coulees and steep grades close to the river and tactfully
skirting the northern edge of the Siksika reserve,” according to an
environmental history of the Bow. “The next summer gangs of tracklayers
hammered their way across the prairie, laying the rails as fast as any track
had ever been put down and then more slowly as they pushed the railway up into
the mountains” along the river’s banks. “Operation of the railway greatly
expanded the market for western beef on the hoof as well as the local market
for slaughtered cattle,” the authors continued. “But the Canadian Pacific
Railway, a large, capital-intensive, technologically advanced corporation with
its own needs, labour requirements, economic imperatives, and differential
influence over decision-making in Ottawa, by degrees restructured life on the
prairie away from the north-south axis of police posts and ranches to an
east-west line of small towns strung along the railway and centred on Calgary.”
[85]
At this early stage, Calgarians were able to draw water directly from the
Bow and Elbow Rivers, or from wells that tap natural springs in what are now
the Inglewood and downtown districts. By the mid-1880s,
Teamster Jack Brennan offered Calgary’s first water distribution service.
Brennan filled a galvanized iron tank from his well opposite time all, mounted
on a horse drawn cart, and delivered water door to door for $0.25 a barrel.
Barbershops offered “hot and cold shower baths,” since few residents had such
conveniences in their own homes.
The provision of water should have been of paramount importance for the
new town’s
administration. With a growing population and a
developing municipal infrastructure, Calgary would soon require a system of
waterworks for domestic use, street cleaning, sewer flushing, and – above all –
fire protection. Like other pioneer towns, Calgary was mostly built of wood.
Without a ready supply of water, the town would be left vulnerable to fire;
insurance companies would consider Calgary to be a bad risk, and fire insurance
would be exceedingly expensive.
[86]
The federal government wanted to fill the prairies with productive
farmers, and it took the energetic leadership of Clifford Sifton to make that
happen. By background a Manitoba lawyer, from 1896 to 1905 Sifton was Canada’s
immigration minister under the Liberal government of Sir Wilfred Laurier.
A number of factors contributed to Sifton’s remarkable success. He
encouraged major recruitment drives for settlers in Britain and Ukraine, whose “stalwart
peasants in sheepskin coats” he believed would be well suited to breaking the
prairie to the plow. The Canadian Pacific Railway also recruited settlers.
Railroads cannot be profitable without goods or people to transport, and the
CPR intended to move both.
Another factor that helped encourage settlement was the closing of the US
frontier. Lured by the promise of 160-acre homesteads for males of 18 years or
more, Americans and people from other countries who had first migrated to the
United States began moving into Canada’s prairies. In addition, the development
of strains of wheat that could mature quickly increased the agricultural
potential of the prairies. These factors and a generally strong economy opened
the floodgates of settlement. Canada’s frontiers began retreating to the north.
Growth and prosperity characterized the final years of the century. This
prosperity was partly driven by technology, which was lowering the cost of
almost everything — from raw materials to manufactured goods to basic
transportation. Locomotives began pulling long trainloads of settlers, their
effects and supplies into Alberta.
Historians refer to the seven-decade period that began in 1890 as Canada’s
Great Transition — the era in which the country developed into a mature
nation-state. Much of that evolution was driven by events in the prairies.
Between 1891 and 1914, an estimated 215,000 men, women and children migrated to
Alberta from Britain, the United States and continental Europe (especially
Ukraine). Central and Eastern Canada contributed an additional 90,000.
Alberta’s
former Lieutenant Governor, Grant McEwan, was among the settlers of that day. He
was a charming man and an extraordinary raconteur: I once sat with him at a
head table, before he gave a passionate speech reflecting his deep concern
about the environment. With masterful effect, he ended his presentation with
deep emotion; after he had finished, a sense of profound concern seemed to hang
about the room.
A brilliant and prolific author, McEwan published his 48th
book in his 97th year, although he didn’t live to hold a copy in his
hands. A man who strongly impressed everybody who ever met him, in 2000 he
received the first state funeral held in the province in four decades.
The book bore the title Watershed:
Reflections on water. “The world’s water appears to be in a constant state
of uneasy movement,” it begins. “It moves in great haste like the Slave River
Rapids of Northern Alberta, and at the incomprehensibly slow pace of
groundwater seeping through silt or sand deep underground in southern
Saskatchewan. Sooner or later it will reach the junction in the water cycle and
start all over again, undiminished and unchanging, the perfect symbol of
timelessness.”[87]
“Water was puzzling and mysterious when I was growing up,”
McEwan wrote as he provided his own growing understanding of the hydrological
cycle. “But water is everybody’s business – or should be,” he continued. Water “is
the foundation, the building block of life; without it, vast areas of country
would be unproductive, supporting other plant and animal life. The human body’s
dependence on it is evidence of that as well. We begin as almost pure water.
The human embryo is almost ninety percent water; during childhood, however,
water content falls to roughly 75 percent of total body weight, and by
adulthood has dropped to 70 percent or less.” But to put those volumes in
perspective, he observes that an adult male of 78 kilos in weight carries more
than 45 kilos of water. “As a matter of routine,” he wrote, that’s “a
considerable burden at any time.”[88]
Settlers who discovered a groundwater spring on their
homesteads “knew that they were very lucky, wrote Grant McEwan. “Celebrations
of thanksgiving were in order, especially when the water
was a good quality.” What they most worried about was alkali water, which was
high in concentrated sodium- or magnesium-based chemicals. If this was the water
they had been dealt, they were victims to its laxative qualities. It was “one
reason why newcomers to the prairies, who had no choice but to drink this
water, had difficulty in obtaining a good night’s sleep.”[89]
The farmer who was unhappy with the paucity of water in his
well, or its high concentration of alkali, had little for relief that didn’t
involve hard labour. The immediate solution was to haul household drinking
water from the freshwater well of a neighbour who had been “lucky in his strike.”
This arrangement that was satisfactory for a short time, “but the necessity of
hitching a team… driving several miles with a barrel of water was bound to
become tiresome,” McEwan wrote. “Invariably, the farmer’s decision was to call
a government well-drilling team to return for another attempt to find the ever-elusive”
fresh groundwater.[90]
After securing water supplies, new arrivals cleared forests and broke
sod to start farms.
As they confined livestock with
barbed-wire fences, they began closing in the prairie. They operated vast
ranches, reporting financial performance back to absentee owners. They set up
shops and stores. With an eye to exporting grain and beef, they developed
granaries and stockyards. They established breweries and other manufacturing
operations. They provided services like blacksmithing, milling and
construction. Doctors, dentists and lawyers began hanging up their shingles.
Accountants started looking after the affairs of young enterprises and new
agencies of government.
The region’s
hotels were sometimes unable to accommodate the swarms of people being
discharged at crowded train stations. The real estate market went from strength
to strength. Religious life flourished around the churches springing up
everywhere, and schools began to educate the young. Government and municipal
buildings went up in larger centres. Civic life became more sophisticated.
Theatres and rodeo created the beginnings of an entertainment industry.
The year 1897 began a period of railroad building gone mad. Line
construction fleshed out the CP system and eventually created two new
transcontinental railways — the Canadian Northern and the Grand Trunk. Central
Canada’s railways were already mature, so crews laid the lion’s share of new
rail in the prairies. The Prairie Provinces soon boasted a dense complex of
trunk and branch lines serving an expanding cereal economy. Hamlets, towns and
cities sprang up around railway stations and along feeder lines.
Though especially strong in Western Canada, growth was remarkable
Canada-wide. With the buoyant optimism that was characteristic of the times, in
1904 Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier made an oft-quoted prediction to Ottawa’s
Canadian Club: “All signs point this way, that the twentieth century will be the
century of Canada.”
In the west, the symphony of growth reached a crescendo in 1905, when an
act of Parliament welcomed Alberta and Saskatchewan into Confederation. The new
provinces were heir to British traditions of law and corporate governance, and
organized around a parliamentary form of government. The province’s first
premier was Alexander Rutherford, a Liberal. One of the early acts of Alberta’s
government was to create a charter for the University of Alberta, to be located
in the City of Strathcona (now part of metropolitan Edmonton).
Such technological marvels as electricity and automotive power began
gracing the land. The prairies were already connected to the world by
telegraph, and local telephony was making an appearance. So was electric lighting
(hydroelectric plants began to appear in Alberta in the late 1890s). And the
first recorded automobile trip from Edmonton to Calgary (a two-day journey)
took place in March, 1906.
Coal mines in southern Alberta were supplying rapidly growing demand. In
the beginning, the market included coal-fired locomotives and the occasional
steam tractor; industrial furnaces, fireplaces and stoves; utilities that
manufactured coal gas. Coal would be the province’s primary energy source until
the middle of the century, and is still a major export.
Many settlers were somewhat aware of Alberta’s oil and gas potential.
Around the then-hamlet of Fort McMurray (a remnant of the fur trade),
Aboriginals had known long before Wa-Pa-Sun about bitumen seeping into the
river. By the turn of the century, a few hardy souls were already trying to
coax oil from surface outcrops of this apparently boundless resource.
The town of Medicine Hat developed gas for light and heat in the 1890s,
and a local brick-making industry grew around gas-fired kilns. And by 1909,
Eugene Coste (often called the father of Canada’s natural gas industry) was in
London to raise funds for a natural gas pipeline to the bustling city of
Calgary. When the 274-kilometre line was completed three years later, natural
gas would begin replacing coal gas and pot-bellied stoves in Alberta’s
second-largest city.
This period of sustained economic growth grounded the economy in
agricultural exports. But as homesteaders were breaking the soil, urban
construction and development were proceeding apace. Entrepreneurs and the town
of Medicine Hat were already beginning to exploit the petroleum resources that
would eventually displace agriculture as the prime source of provincial
prosperity. Even tourism had begun. To lure wealthy tourists, in the mid-1880s
Canadian Pacific began constructing hotels in the Rockies.
The province’s agricultural economy was still small and prey to endless
natural disasters — early frost, grasshoppers, hailstorms and, in the south,
drought. But the settlers still felt that opportunity abounded. Economic
expansion released an unstoppable sense of optimism into the air. The
experience of helter-skelter growth made everything look possible.
The first generation to go by the name Albertans, these settlers were
astonished at how quickly the streets of new villages, towns and cities filled
with horses and wagons. Dazzled by the first of many booms, they correctly
believed growth would continue unabated for many years to come.
Within weeks of Calgary’s incorporation, the newly-formed town Council
received a proposal from the Waterous Engine Works Company to
install a waterworks system for the new town. Judged too expensive, the
proposal went nowhere. “A suitable system of waterworks for this municipality
is without our reach at the present time,” reported the Committee on Fire,
Water and Light in January, 1885. Council decided instead to install a system
of wells at key downtown intersections for use by the newly-established Fire
Brigade.
Over the next few years the town installed larger underground tanks wells
sealed with pitched wooden cribbing. The town fire engine pumped Bow River
water into the tanks. Council later approved construction of a windmill-powered
well next to the Fire Hall on 7
th Avenue. But the town-operated
system continued to provoke criticism until 1891, when it was replaced. There
was a story behind that.
[91]
“Calgary’s worst nightmare came true on Sunday, November 7, 1886,” author
Harry Sanders wrote. At that time fire broke out at the rear of Parish and Sons
flour and feed store. “The flames spread quickly, and before the end of the day
a large portion of the downtown lay in ruins. Although a constant supply of
water was available from the tank and railway grounds, it wasn’t enough….”
[92]
“The Great Fire of 1886 pointed out the immediate need for a pressurized
water system,” he continued. “A further imperative was health: without
provision of adequate sewer and water, it was feared the water table would
become contaminated from ‘sewage and wash and slops.’ Before an adequate sewer
system was installed, wells were threatened by pollution from cesspools,
privies and open street drains.”
The waterworks system could be “… an exceedingly profitable source of
municipal revenue,” editorialised the
Calgary
Herald on November 20, 1886. “The convenience of being able to procure any
quantity of water at a moment’s notice right in one’s own house by simply
turning a tap is so obvious, that once introduced it ceases to be a luxury and
becomes a necessity.” The newspaper continued that “builders will soon arrange
for the pipes in new houses as naturally as for the chimney.” In comments that
probably did not reflect who made key decisions about household decisions, the
editor said “a man will no more think of holding his water in buckets from the
nearest well, than he would of lighting his house with tallow candles.”
[93]
“Falling water has always excited the
emotions,” Christopher Armstrong and H.V. Nelles wrote in their
commentary on the development of hydroelectric power along the Bow River
. From time immemorial, they wrote, “thundering
waterfalls and rolling rapids filled hearts with both dread and wonder.” They
believed such fearsome places, “where missteps could lead to death, were surely
the abode of the gods.” Christians often believed waterfalls “were sites of
revelation where God made manifest his enormous power, casting human
pretensions in his full perspective. For millennia, human beings approached
waterfalls with a sense of fear, all and wonder.” [94]
That was then,
however, and this is now. In recent centuries, the power of falling waters “stirred
another human emotion, ambition.” It stirred notions about how to use water
power for utilitarian purposes. Gradually, mechanical engineers found physical
uses for waterpower as they looked for ways to use that energy, which was going
to waste in conspicuous display, “for productive human ends.” Put another way,
there was a genie in a bottle. Driven by the growing prosperity wrought by the Industrial
Revolution, early engineers sought ways to employ that genie in the service of
humanity, for the sake of profits. “Millers led the way, creating millponds and
re-channeling flows in ever more efficient ways to turn their waterwheels and
crank their machinery.” [95]
In Europe and the Americas, electrical power generation through steam
power and hydraulic systems was well understood and widely exploited
commercially by the beginning of the twentieth century. Large corporations
produced, sold, and installed the equipment to generate, transmit, distribute,
and consume electricity for a variety of purposes: domestic, commercial,
electromechanical, industrial, and traction. Following the relentless logic of greater
profitability, electrical systems and generation facilities sought ever-larger
power sources to generate electricity at the lowest cost and the highest
efficiency.
Other forms of
industrial development began a century ago, when speculation about mastering
the kinetic energy released by water falling from mountain lakes along Alberta’s
southern border with BC led to plans to electrify the province. For decades,
the province and Ottawa were in conflict on matters of regulatory control.
Immigration and settlement into Alberta continued as the twentieth
century, and the explosive population growth in urban centres drove the demand
for electricity. Between 1901 and 1911, Calgary’s population increased from about
4,400 to nearly 44,000. Coupled with the city’s close proximity to the powerful
water resources of the Rockies, this population growth, made Calgary the
epicentre of early hydroelectric development in the province.
The city’s first plant was nothing like the mega-projects that would
characterize hydro later on. It was a small shack-like building constructed by
the Calgary Water Power Company in 1893. This two-storey structure spanned the
south bank of the Bow River and Prince’s Island, just north of downtown
Calgary. The system required a weir – a barrier which altered the flow of the
river and pooled water, channelling it into the plant. Originally constructed
to supplement the company’s wood-fuelled steam plant, the system later powered a
generator. In 1894, the Calgary Water Power Company received a ten-year monopoly
to provide the city with electricity.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Alberta experienced one of its
first great economic booms, with Canada’s business community seeking investment
opportunities. One key area of investment was the development of hydropower.
By 1905, existing facilities and infrastructure could not meet Calgary’s
demand for electricity. Hydroelectric power was still the cheapest option
available, and the region needed all it could get. New corporations entered the
race to develop southern Alberta’s hydro potential. To provide Calgary with
badly needed electricity, in 1911 Calgary Power completed the province’s first larger-scale
hydroelectric plant at the Bow River’s Horseshoe Falls, eighty kilometres from
Calgary.
[96]
In 1907, Calgary businessmen W. M. Alexander and W. J. Budd formed the
Calgary Power and Transmission Company and negotiated the right to build a
hydroelectric plant at Horseshoe Falls and signed a contract to deliver
electricity from the project to Calgary by 1909. The two men had severely
underestimated the project’s costs and engineering challenges, however, and
were unable to meet their commitments. In the end, they sold the company and
its associated rights to financier Max Aitken stepped in and purchased the
company (and its associated rights).
Not yet
thirty years of age, Aitken “had already ascended the heights of Canadian
finance capitalism, earning a reputation along the way as one of its sharpest,
most aggressive, and slightly slippery company promoters.” Later knighted Lord
Beaverbrook, he had “an indomitable will to succeed, a salesman’s
counter-jumping enthusiasm, a rare zest for life, and a relentless focus on the
business at hand.”[97]
Though slow and plagued with challenges, the plant went into operation in
May, 1911. The Horseshoe Hydroelectric Dam’s turbines gave the facility a peak
capability of 14,000 kilowatts. That much power provided the growing city, which
now hosted repair facilities for the Canadian Pacific Railway, with cheap and plentiful
power. Four other plants would later join this facility on the Bow River
watershed.
[98]
In August
1919, James White delivered an important paper to an industrial congress in
Calgary.
[99]
His general topic was the availability of power in Alberta, in terms of water,
coal and natural gas. He begins with comments on the hydropower potential of
the rivers flowing northward from Alberta. These included the Elbow, the Bow,
the North Saskatchewan, the Athabasca, the Peace and the Slave rivers. Both
White’s supporters and his critics described White as a “bright, ambitious, and
single-minded man devoted to the sustainable
management of Canada’s natural resources…whose
geographic knowledge of Canada was unsurpassed.”
[100]
Though brief, this piece of work is more than a footnote to history. His
commentary and his influence contributed to the mastery of hydropower in
western Canada’s rivers, which soon began along the Bow River.
Citing the popular belief at the
time that “water-power is inherently cheaper than steam-power,” and it requires
few attendants and no fuel except for heating in the plant, White demurred. “Usually
the cost of development and installation is much higher than with steam-power,”
he said. Also, the location of the “water-power plant is fixed by nature. This
lack of elasticity necessitates, on average, a longer transmission line to
transmit” the current. “Also, the service is less reliable owing to the
possibility of lack of power due to unusually low water conditions.”
[101]
More efficient and capable of development on a larger scale and able to
be sourced at distance, hydro power displaced such mechanical technologies as
coal-powered systems at the end of the nineteenth century. The physics of
electricity became understood in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
At the end of the nineteenth, tinkerers like Edison and Tesla, then electrical
engineers and capitalist entrepreneurs took it on themselves “to work out,
manufacture, and distribute the integrated [systems needed] to produce,
transmit, and then use electrical power.” These developments were
transformative. They allowed power generation “in one place but consumed with
minimal transmission losses dozens, hundreds, and eventually thousands of
kilometres away. Previously, energy users had to locate themselves at sources
of power, or power production had to take place close to sites of consumption.
Long distance transmission broke the bond between production and consumption.
Henceforth, industry did not have to go to power; power came to industry.”
[102]
This system rechannelled the kinetic energy of falling water into
electricity-powered machines all over the world. “Waterfalls went silent,” the
authors wrote, and the dams holding the water back converted vast quantities of
hydraulic energy were into electricity “to light up the night, energize
factories and transportation, and perform a host of mundane domestic tasks.”
These new hydroelectric tools, which “subjugated falling water and transformed
hydrology, took root nowhere in the world more firmly than Canada, with its
abundant and widely distributed waterpowers. Canada quickly became one of the
most aggressive developers of hydroelectricity in absolute quantities, on a per
capita basis, and as a proportion of its total energy production mix.”
[103]
Canada still has that international ranking.
Eventually,
southern Alberta did, too. Beginning with Horseshoe Falls, the first Bow River
projects became fully functional during the First World War – one result of
which was economic growth in the area well above the national average. During
the Roaring Twenties, which was another period of economic growth and high
migration into the prairies, the systems on the river doubled in capacity.
Development stopped with the Great Depression, though, and didn’t pick up again
until the early 1940s. Rapid growth continued through the 1950s, then came to a
halt during the following decade. “By then,” after all, “the Bow, like many
other rivers in Canada, had been dammed, plumbed, machined, and wired to its
maximum, and Calgarians, along with other Southern Albertans, would have to
look elsewhere to satisfy their electricity dependence.”[104]
One of the more memorable stories in
electrification politics had to do with the notion of creating a national
hydroelectric grid, which surfaced in the mid-1970s. In many ways, the
situation reflects a kind of dysfunction which has often revealed itself in
Canadian politics, and reflects the division of powers provided by the 1867 British
North America Act (Canada’s constitution) and its 20 successors.
The division of
powers between the provinces and Ottawa has led to numerous skirmishes between
the two levels of government over the last 150 years. In the most recent
legislation, the federal government has jurisdiction over marine transportation
and waterways that cross provincial boundaries, especially in respect to
environmental law, while the provinces have control of water resources within
their own territories. That said, the act proclaims that it wants comprehensive
programs undertaken by the Government of Canada where Canada has jurisdiction
and by the Government of Canada in cooperation with provincial governments, “ in
accordance with the responsibilities of the federal government and each of the
provincial governments in relation to water resources, for research and
planning with respect to those resources and for their conservation,
development and utilization to ensure their optimum use for the benefit of all
Canadians.”[105]
Jurisdictional
disputes have often taken place within Canada based on different
interpretations of federal and provincial rights and, of course, on struggles
based on the needs and perspectives of different political parties. Take as an
example the attempt to integrate provincial power systems in the 1970s, after a
cartel of national monopolies known as OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries) became the most powerful player in setting world prices.[106]
A First Ministers
Conference on Energy in January 1974 began discussions on the creation of a
national energy grid, which would supplement energy from imported oil. The idea
was to construct an east-west line from Selkirk, B.C., to Eel River, New
Brunswick, but not to improve transmission lines to the US. Two years later the
provinces appointed an advisory council (on which the federal government had
observer status) to study the matter. Its report came out in 1978.
The economic
benefits of the system would “derive from replacing oil-fired generation with
less costly hydro generation, the reduction of generating reserve, the diverse
use of generating equipment across different Canadian time zones, the enhanced
security of supply, and a flexible response to changing energy policy,” wrote Karl
Froschauer in his authoritative study. There were other issues at play,
however. For example, there were questions about whether enhanced north-south
electricity trade would be a better deal for Canada. And then, of course, there
was the matter of who would be in charge. There would no doubt be a need for an
organization to administer such a system, and – an issue which had been at the
centre of a conference on the same topic in Victoria 16 year earlier – “which
level of government would have jurisdiction over a national grid.”[107]
The notion of a
national grid fell apart, and the provinces tried to develop regional grids. The
Western Canadian portion of this initiative began in April 1978 at a Western
Premiers conference in Yorkton, Saskatchewan. Plans for a western power grid –
connecting the power systems of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and
Manitoba – were announced, with an economic analysis that suggested that such
an undertaking would benefit the provincial economies. A technical review team
established to study this project concluded in February 1979 “that substantial
benefits would flow from the interconnection of the four provinces.”[108]
Once again,
however, political and private interests diverged and the plan collapsed. First
off the mark was British Columbia. The province’s utilities were sceptical and
the Social Credit government of William (Bill) Bennett – said the report “presented
insufficient grounds to participate.”
Alberta’s
government also commissioned a review of the grid report, and the outcome was
confirmation that the regional interconnection of electrical systems was a good
idea. So Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba signed a Western Electric Power Grid
study agreement in March, 1980. Based on technical information supplied by
provincial utilities, the resulting report estimated that a regional grid would
yield a net benefit of $150 million. Furthermore, construction of the Limestone
hydro project then under development on the Nelson River in Manitoba would be
less harmful to western Canada’s environment than the coal-fired thermal plants
proposed for Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Then things took an
ugly turn. Speaking from an economic perspective, it became clear that building
the hydro plant in Manitoba would increase investment and employment in that
province. It would reduce investment and lessen employment in Saskatchewan and
Alberta. The latter province – which had the largest population and the most
developed economy of the three Prairie Provinces – would have to buy the lion’s
share of the electricity.
Despite a soupçon
of farce, matters then quickly fell apart. In October 1981, Manitoba and
Alberta announced that the Energy Ministers for the prairies had reached an
accord. Saskatchewan, however, claimed that they had not, and negotiations went
from bad to worse. Put off by the prospect of lower employment and deferred
investment during a period of economic downturn, Alberta and Saskatchewan
postponed participation in a western power grid. Manitoba signed an export
contract with the Northern States Power Corporation of Minneapolis in 1984, selling
electricity from the Limestone project. Alberta became interested in developing
the hydro potential on the Slave River.
This is how the
dream of a national power grid broke down.[109]
According
to the International Energy Agency, only China (1,066.1 TW·h/year) and Brazil (411.2
TW·h/year) produce more hydropower than Canada (
376.7 TW·h/year)
.
As the graphic illustrates, however, this country has a great deal of potential
for future development. Canada as a whole has developed about 32 per cent of
her hydro potential; by contrast, development in Alberta is barely seven per
cent. Most of
Alberta’s potential is in Peace-Athabasca Delta, however, and there would be a
lot of environmental and Aboriginal issues for dams there. Hydro dams will
never grace all the potential dam sites Canada has to offer. Also, of course,
the energy flowing down Canada’s rivers represents far more potential for clean
energy than this country will likely ever need.
Especially
in Canada, this will become one of the major factors in the disruption of the
transportation system. Hydroelectric energy increasingly displaces hydrocarbon-based
fuels, Canada’s transportation system will respond by using more electric
vehicles, many of them entirely or partially self-driving.[110]
One outcome will be
a decline in vehicle ownership, and therefore of vehicle manufacture. Another
will be fewer emissions. A third will be lower operating costs. As the
chart shows, this trend – both disruptive and environmentally positive – is
growing rapidly, with Tesla vehicles leading the pack.
[111]
For now, plug-in
hybrids like Chevy Volt make sense in Canada because of distances and “range
anxiety.” But in a sharing/rental environment, you would only need hybrid or
conventional vehicles for longer trips and could rely on all-electrics most of
the time. Similarly self-driving vehicles would be preferred for commuting and
humdrum urban transportation, but you still might want to take the wheel for
longer trips.
The first transition
in much of the country would be from multi-car to one-car households. The
second would be to substantial numbers of car-free vehicle households, completely
reliant on shared or rental vehicles.
“We are on the cusp of one of the fastest, deepest, most consequential
disruptions of transportation in history. By 2030, within 10 years of
regulatory approval of autonomous vehicles (AVs), 95% of U.S. passenger miles
traveled will be served by on-demand autonomous electric vehicles owned by
fleets, not individuals, in a new business model we call ‘transport-as-a-service,’”
wrote economists James Arbib
and Tony Seba. This disruptive development “will have enormous
implications across the transportation and oil industries, decimating entire
portions of their value chains, causing oil demand and prices to plummet, and
destroying trillions of dollars in investor value — but also creating trillions
of dollars in new business opportunities, consumer surplus and GDP growth.”
There is “overwhelming evidence,”
they go on to suggest, that emerging system dynamics “will create a virtuous
cycle of decreasing costs and increasing quality of service and convenience,
which will in turn drive further adoption” of self-driving vehicles. “Conversely,
individual vehicle ownership, especially of internal combustion engine vehicles,
will enter a vicious cycle of increasing costs, decreasing convenience and
diminishing quality of service.”
[112]
To the extent these forecasts are accurate, perhaps, Canada’s
hydro-electric potential will benefit.
More than 300 rivers and lakes lie along, or
flow across, the Canada/US border. This has a lot of implications for the
relationship between the two countries. For one, there are complex water
management issues. For another, it makes the likelihood of trans-national
distribution and sale of these resources sometimes seem inevitable.
That concern stood behind the
headline,”As long as the rivers flow, they’ll try to dam them!”, which blared out
of an indigenous publication in 1992. According to the lengthy commentary, during
the late 1950s and early 1960s a group of business and government officials had
a “pipe-dream” that since Canada was “the last haven of clean fresh water, it
would be quite feasible to divert the clean, fresh water south to the United
States. The initial outcry from the general public was enough to put the
project on hold.”
As a result of “exploiting and
misusing their water supply and water tables,” the US was experiencing an
internal water crisis. In 1964, the North American Water and Power Alliance
(NAWAPA) a Los Angeles-based engineering firm proposed efforts “to divert
massive amounts of Canadian water to the US.” In 1965, it continued, a letter
from the Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources University of Alberta
assistant professor of geography Louis Hamill confirmed that the federal
government “was aware of the NAWAPA plan and its costs and effects on the
environment.” Along with other Canadians across the country, Aboriginals
protested this scheme.
For example, in August 1990 a group of Peigan
Aboriginals – they called themselves the Lonefighters – “made camp near the
Oldman River, which has sustained the cultural and spiritual life of the Peigan
people. In 1976 the province of Alberta had announced plans to build a dam on
the Oldman. The idea was shelved due to public outcry. In 1984 it was announced
that the dam would be built. The dam will flood 5,800 acres, the habitat of
deer and prairie falcon. Herons and some large cliff swallow will disappear.
Over 300 archaeological sites and 46 historic sites will also disappear.” To
the Peigan, he wrote, the river is more than a source of food and water. “It is
Napi, the Old Man, the creator.”[113]
Several years of litigation in the
1980s and 1990s led to a federal court of Canada ruling that the project had
not received a proper environmental assessment. The facility’s proponents duly
completed the assessment, and the dam went into operation in 1991. Since 2003, ATCO has operated the Oldman River
Hydroelectric Plant at the dam. Twenty-five per cent owned by the Piikani
Nation, the plant’s average annual generation is approximately 114
gigawatt-hours per year. The reservoir created by the dam and the surrounding
area has become the Oldman Dam Provincial Recreation Area.
In a 1985
summary, Anthony Dorcey prepared a concise summary of the causes of water
pollution, describing the issue throughout Canada in stark terms. To one degree
or another, each illustration applies somewhere in Alberta. “Water pollution
can be classified according to the nature of pollutants, to the sources
releasing them and water bodies into which they are discharged,” he wrote. Where
they exist, pathogens – disease-causing microbes (usually from human sewage) – are
a big risk to human health. The greater their concentration, the greater is the
risk.
Biochemical oxygen demand is created by organic wastes decaying in the
water body. Major sources of this problem include pulp and paper mills and
municipal sewage. If the concentration of dissolved oxygen in the water reaches
zero, fish and other aquatic species die. Anaerobic decay can generate noxious
gases like hydrogen sulphide.
Nutrients, particularly in nitrogen- and phosphorus-rich waters,
accelerate problems within lakes and streams. They can result in rich plant
growth, which can reduce recreational activities. Plankton blooms in the water
can further depress oxygen levels. These nutrients come from municipal sewage, urban
runoff and agricultural waste. In his commentary, Dorcey describes numerous
approaches to pollution control.
[114]
These worries seem never-ending. For example, in a 2015 editorial, the
Globe and Mail noted that Canada is a nation of resources, first and foremost. “We dig
them, pump them, cut them, crush them, grow them and export them,” the
newspaper wrote. “They are a huge part of the economy and a massive wealth
generator.” Echoing the same themes that have appeared so often in this
manuscript, the newspaper opined that “the country’s most valuable resource of
all – water – is the least discussed and most misunderstood. Even acknowledging
water’s potential economic value has become taboo for politicians and
policy-makers.”
In
today’s Canada, water export is “a political no-go zone. Ottawa and most
provinces have banned bulk exports,” and most Canadian residents oppose it, too.
“Selling it to the most obvious customer – the United States – is largely
prohibited under various trade deals and treaties. Even absent those hurdles,
piping or shipping vast quantities of water isn’t economically feasible,” the
editor wrote. “And yet Canadians would be wise to prepare for the day when a
thirsty and desperate world wants something that we have in abundance,”
according to this thoughtful commentary. “It’s time for the country to explore
the issue, accurately quantify and measure the water resources we have, and
then determine how much we can withdraw from various waterways without harming
the environment. There should be strict rules governing its use, inside the
country or for export. And water pricing needs to better reflect its value.”
Two
siblings – the phenomena of global warming and climate change – are forcing the
debate on Canada, as they are on the rest of the planet. While floods seem to
be increasing common and severe in some areas – Alberta is one of them – many parts
of North America are experiencing drought, shrinking reservoirs and depleted
groundwater. Canada already exports massive quantities of water. Water is
embedded in various agricultural and other products domestic industries sell to
the world.[115]
Now, to what degree can we share our abundance with the world?
Water to spare?
Many countries have far greater water
resources per capita than Canada. For example, Greenland and Iceland have tiny
populations and vast glaciers. On the other end of the climatic scale, Guyana, Suriname,
Papua New Guinea and Bhutan have small populations in tropical climates with
endless downpours. Their per capita water resources are thus greater than those
of Canada and other geographical giants.
The best way to understand Canada’s
water resources is to place it among its peers. The table does so – it is a
variation on the chart presented on page 20 – by adding a per capita water
resource calculation. The result? Although in absolute terms among the world’s
large countries Canada’s water resources are the fourth largest in the world, in
per capita terms they come out on top.[116]
Within that context, it is a matter of concern that even parts of Canada are
facing water problems. There is an irony that southern Ontario, which is
immediately accessible to three of the Great Lakes, is one of those areas. Less
surprising is that the Prairie Provinces are being affected. In this study, the
situation in Alberta is the focus.
Although large-scale water trade between
Canada and the US has never taken place, the issue does not go away. For
example, the late Alberta premier Peter Lougheed told the Globe and Mail in 2005 that “the United States will be coming after
our fresh water aggressively in three to five years. We must prepare, to ensure
that we aren’t trapped in an ill-advised response.”
Part of that preparation took the form
of economic arguments about the very nature of water. Here are some views from
economists in respect to trade in water, which appeared in 2007. The ideas in
their Government of Canada briefing note fed into the question of whether water
could be tradable.
“The Great Recycling and Northern
Development (GRAND) Canal and The North American Water and Power Alliance
(NAWAPA) distribution network are well known examples of bulk water export
schemes proposed in the 1960s,” they began, echoing concerns about projects
mentioned in the Lonefighters National
Communication Network commentary. If implemented, they said, such projects
would involve the diversion of hundreds of cubic kilometres of water from
Canada to the United States each year.
Noting the common fear in Canada that
such international agreements as the North American Free Trade Agreement could
force this country to allow the sale of our water to the United States, they
argued that trade agreements by their nature can only apply to goods, services,
and commodities. “Water is not a service, although it may be used to provide
services,” they wrote. In small quantities – for example, a bottle of drinking
water – it may be described as a good. “But we are not concerned with small
quantities.” The real question was whether bulk water is a commodity. If not,
then the NAFTA agreements do not apply.
“This briefing note explores whether
water is a commodity,” they continued. “Given the lack of precedents in common
law, it approaches the question through economic theories, provincial policies
and the evolution of water law in Western Canada.” A
commodity is an economic good, a tradable good, a product or an article of
commerce, they wrote – “something for which there is an established market
where the commodity can be bought and sold in commercial transactions” between
willing buyers and sellers.
As owners of the resource, Canadian provinces have tried to
find a balance between the essential services water provides and its value as
an economic input. In some provinces, legislation “appears to allow for the
commoditization of water under certain circumstances, marking an evolution from
riparian rights, to prior allocation, to management of a scarce resource.” Other
provinces – Alberta, for example – “allow access to water in rural areas for
domestic use and family agriculture without the need for a licence, as an
essential service. However, licences are usually required for larger volumes
for industry and agriculture. In Alberta, water use licences can be traded,
giving water some of the characteristics of a commodity.”
Water exports are exported once they have been put in
containers and sold. There is no restriction on the location of use of bottled
water. If someone wished to export bottled water from Canada for washing cars
or filling swimming pools, they might be thought of as eccentric, but it would
not violate any contracts, policies, agreements, or legislation. “Should
bottled water be distinguished from larger containers, such as a tanker,
pipeline, or even an open canal?” they asked.
It is difficult to find arguments under trade law why the
size of the container would allow a government to prohibit export. If a company
exporting bottled water in the containers used in typical office water coolers “decided
to export by truck or tanker – or even by pipeline or canal – how would
governments control the situation? The policy issue is the terms and conditions
under which export is permitted regardless of container size.”
With respect to bulk water export, the issue has still to be
resolved as a matter of trade, “despite a large volume of speculative
literature. A commodity under NAFTA and the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT) is a legally negotiated position and not necessarily dependent on
the economic definition.” To date there has not been a ruling by a court or
trade panel on whether water is a commodity and thus the legal question of
whether water is a commodity cannot yet be answered with certainty. It should
be noted that Canada, the United States, and Mexico released a joint statement
to the effect that water was not covered by NAFTA, but such a statement may
have little legal force, even though a court might consider it to be indicative
of the intent of the governments. Should water be ruled a commodity in the
future, Canada may find herself legally bound to export the stuff.[117]
In 1987 the
government of Alberta did issue construction permits on the Oldman River Dam,
despite declarations by the Environment Council of Alberta that existing
reservoirs and canals in the area would suffice to serve farmers in the Oldman
River Valley. It is suspected that the project is export oriented because it is
unnecessary for irrigation and was included in a 1979 memo that illustrated a
ten stage plan for inter-basin transfers: The Oldman River Dam appeared to be
stage one.
In a complex
hydro-economic report, three academics with a keen interest in water
conservation argue – not for the first time in these pages – that “to
support the ecological services that underpin our quality of life, Canadians
must limit their demands for water and start protecting existing water sources.”
To do so, they argue, will ultimately involve redesigning our communities.
Responding
to the risks involved in potential water shortages, they wrote, requires
changing behaviours and attitudes write Oliver Brandes, David Brooks, and
Michael M’Gonigle. “But with change comes opportunity. The new script will be
about innovation and new relationships with our surroundings.” Those opportunities
include using technologies that enable toilets to “use half the water they now
use (or even no water at all);” recycling waste water for other uses; and
turning water guzzling lawns into gardens based on native, drought-resistant
plants. “Ultimately, our communities must be designed for water conservation – not
just retrofitted when we approach water limits.”
Such
changes would not come about quickly. They would need careful planning, based
on “transitional steps. First, we gain time by changing from supply management
to demand management. Then, we begin to address deeper concerns about the
fundamental nature of the demands themselves. This moves us to a new stage –
the ‘soft path,’ where water is viewed primarily as a service rather than as a
product,” they propose. “Water conservation then moved to centre stage,
triggering a fundamentally larger societal transformation. This transformation
is about a new way of dealing with water, nature, and ourselves – ultimately,
it is a form of participatory management called ‘ecological governance.’”
Gradually, they argue, ecosystem health and processes would be important
considerations “at all levels of decision-making, both upstream and downstream
and throughout the watershed.” Thus, the shift from “supply-side management to
the soft path” would follow “a spectrum of water management approaches that move
us from compulsively getting more resources to thoughtfully governing resource
uses.… Taken together, these sequential yet overlapping steps represent a
strategy that ensures a paradigm shift from wasteful to sustainable consumption
of fresh water in Canada.”[118]
In increasingly
integrated economies, firms or investors can acquire water
by investing in
the assets to which it may be linked. For instance, outside investors may
purchase irrigated land with integrated water rights, or – directly or
indirectly through anonymous stock market transactions – through buy valuable
water rights or water access. Investors may move their water-intensive production
facilities away from water-scarce and toward water-abundant areas. They can do
this by expanding or relocating irrigated agriculture, by processing
agricultural foods, by pulp and paper manufacturing and, as we have seen, by hydro-electric
and thermal electricity generation. Thus, Canadians should expect to see
relative shortages or scarcity of water in any region of North America result
in changes to the patterns of ownership and location of water-using production
facilities.
Changes in the relative scarcity or abundance of consumer goods can affect
water resource use and management in integrated economies. It is therefore
important to pay attention to the concept of “virtual,” or “embedded,” water:
the water that is necessary to produce commodities. Economist Theodore
Horbulyk, an economist who specializes in water consumption, says the production
of the world’s food supply uses 70 times more water than does the water consumed
by the planet’s households.
“Future shortages in global food markets may start to put upward pressure
on the prices of water intensive commodities such as food grains,” he says. “This
will translate into increased competition for water resources in food producing
countries such as Canada. In a world that will be adjusting to global climate
change or imbalances in population growth and economic development, increasingly
open and active commodity trading systems and trade agreements” should increase
the transmission rate at which these shortages reach users of domestic water
resources. “These linkages work in both directions,” he says. “Changes in world
commodity trade can increase competition for domestic water resources.” Moreover,
effective water management can influence Canada’s trade volumes and
international competitiveness.
To illustrate external economic pressures on water resources, he says, “Consider
the water storage for hydroelectric generation in southern Alberta. Historically,
water was impounded in the summer months and released to generate electricity
for local markets in the winter months, when seasonal energy demand was
greatest.” In recent years, summer seasonal energy demand has surpassed that in
winter, even in local electricity markets. What is more, the expansion of the
continental distribution grid means that California’s energy demands and US
energy regulators, for example, have increasing influence in decisions about how
Alberta’s dams will be operated. “If the operators of hydroelectric storage
facilities see high spot market prices for electricity in the summer months,
and if there is sufficient electricity transmission capacity available to reach
those markets, then these operators may spill more water from storage
reservoirs through their generators,” according to Theodore Horbulyk. “In this
example, electricity market forces elsewhere on the continent have the effect
of raising Alberta’s river flows and of making more surface water available
downstream in the summer months, when that water can provide much higher value
to irrigators and environmentalists alike.”
Historically, he says, “There have been no water markets with similar
enabling institutions to which either the irrigators or the environmentalists
can turn to achieving equivalent transactions directly within their own
province,” but this is changing. “Trade-related competition for water resources
will not only be related to irrigation and manufacturing; water-
based
tourism, fishing, recreation, and travel.” Water use also reflects “trade in
services.” In practice, this means competition for water resources might represent
increased demand for ecological and ecosystem uses of water. International
trade agreements that include environmental safeguards restricting water uses
in other countries may add pressure on demand for Canada’s water.
[119]
Of
course, Canada is a water-rich country, as these pages have repeatedly shown. Water
and sanitation in developing countries may seem far removed from the situation
in Alberta and the rest of Canada, but it is a fundamental need for almost half
the world. Recent estimates have it that 1.8 billion people are drinking
fecally contaminated water and 2.4 billion do not have access to adequate
toilets.
“It is cheaper to make water better: bad water
and sanitation currently impose an unnecessary cost of $323 billion a year on
households outside the advanced economies,” according to a post on the Alberta
Water Portal. “The same money could be used to improve public water and
sanitation systems.”
Speaking
about the global situation, the authors assert, as does CAWST, that “solving
water for all is a race against time: The cost of coping with inadequate access
to water – through packaged water purchases, home water treatment, and tanker
deliveries is growing much faster than utility investment.” Innovation is the
key. “We need to innovate around the business model and the technology: good
water and sanitation are both affordable – even for the very poor. What stands
in the way of universal access is often the lack of appropriate and affordable
service choices on offer. The paper suggested that we need to look at
micro-credits, decentralised systems, value from waste technologies, utility
performance programmes, smart networks and micro-utilities too.”[120]
Based
on simple, low-cost systems developed by an engineering professor at the
University of Calgary, a group of individuals formed a Calgary-based charity,
the Centre for Affordable Water and Sanitation Technology (CAWST). In essence,
this was an effort to take Canada’s good fortune to the many nations where
shortages of clean water for drinking and sanitation are the root of suffering
and sickness.
This
dates back to the efforts of Dr. David Manz – formerly a professor at the
University of Calgary – who created a simple and inexpensive water filtration
system known as the biosand filter. This led to the creation of a Calgary-based
charity known as the Centre for Affordable Water and Sanitation Technology, in
a somewhat convoluted way.
CAWST addresses the need for safe drinking water and sanitation by
building local knowledge and skills on household solutions people can implement
for themselves. That model was born out of Calgary’s engineering know-how and
business acumen.
The charity’s co-founder, Camille Dow Baker, spent more than two decades
as an executive in the international sector of Calgary’s oil and gas industry,
which exposed her to the poverty in many of the developing nations in which her
company was working. After graduating with a Bachelor of Engineering from
McGill University, Baker worked in the petroleum industry for over 20 years in
executive positions with a variety of Calgary-based oil companies served on the
board of directors of the Alberta Oil Sands Technical Research Authority.
As a career change she sought to apply engineering principles to the
problem of supplying clean water and sanitation worldwide, and enrolled in the
Masters Environmental Science Design programme at the University of Calgary.
She undertook her master’s project on biosand filter technology with Manz, and
in 2001 they co-founded CAWST to transfer these technologies to poor countries.
In strategic terms, the basic concepts behind the organization are
simple, but powerful. “With the right knowledge and skills anyone, anywhere can
take ownership of their own water, sanitation and hygiene,” the organization’s
website claims. People need “to take action in their homes and neighbourhoods,
builds resiliency, and ensures appropriate solutions for the local water
context.” The charity works with local organizations and governments best
suited to provide quality water and sanitation services, building “the skills
and knowledge of water and health practitioners to start, strengthen and grow
their water, sanitation and hygiene services.”
Today, CAWST has one of the strongest water and sanitation technical
teams in the international development sector, with particular expertise in
decentralized water and sanitation options and capacity building of field
workers. CAWST does not implement water and sanitation projects or fund
projects directly. Instead, it builds the capacity of local organizations to
provide water and sanitation services to their own communities. To appreciate
the importance of the work the organization is doing, consider the following:
·
An estimated 842,000 people die each year due to
preventable diarrheal disease; 43% are children under the age of five.
·
Chronic diarrhea and intestinal worms in
children, mainly from inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene, cause half of
global malnutrition and one quarter of stunting.
·
Waterborne diseases cause children to miss
school, adults to lose income (they have no paid sick days), and pregnant women
and newborn babies to face serious health risks.
·
In many parts of the world, girls and women are
at risk of sexual violence when they go out at night to find discrete places to
relieve themselves.
These are some of the reasons unsafe water and inadequate sanitation
contribute to poverty in much of the world. To illustrate the magnitude of
CAWST’s impact over time, the organization says it has provided
13,100,000
children, women and men with better water or sanitation. It has trained 6,600,000
people in the use of its technologies. And some 6,500 organizations – Rotary
clubs, for example – have supported CAWST projects, in 164 countries.[121]
Meanwhile,
global population stands at more than seven billion and continues to grow. The
result is that the world is short of grains to reduce widespread starvation.
Alberta could play an important role in ameliorating this situation, since its
agriculturally productive regions are shifting northward (because of global
warming), and the province has large supplies of fresh water.
Water
use and consumption increased in Alberta throughout the twentieth century.
Besides being essential for life and sanitation, it plays important roles in
many aspects of manufacture, for example. To ensure adequate water supply and
reduce the risk of flooding, some cities constructed large reservoirs. Calgary’s
Glenmore reservoir is a good example. Constructed by damming the Elbow River
during the Depression, it became an important recreational area (fishing,
boating, hiking, birding) as well as a reliable source of water.
After a century of petroleum
development and the associated impacts it had on the petroleum industry, in
recent years responsibility for management of Alberta’s water supplies was
recently ceded to the Alberta Energy Regulator – an organization established
after 1930, when the federal government ceded ownership of the bulk of Alberta’s
mineral rights to the province.
The
National Resources Transfer Acts gave natural resources over to the control of
the Prairie Provinces. One of Alberta’s first actions was to establish its own
Forest Service and reaffirm that the forest reserves in the headwaters of its
prairie rivers were to be managed to protect water supplies. During its first
two decades, the Eastern Rockies Forest Conservation Board was one of
federal-provincial collaboration, wrote Kevin van Tighem, which made headwaters
protection its “top priority.”
“The return of Alberta’s headwaters to full provincial
control seemed promising at first,” he continued. “A new Progressive
Conservative government, led by Calgary lawyer Peter Lougheed, had won the 1971
election. Faced with competing views about the highest and best use of public
land,” Lougheed’s government launched public hearings in 1973. The following year,
the province’s newly established Environmental Conservation Authority released
recommendations for land-use and resource development in the Eastern Slopes
that, yet again, emphasized watershed values, he continued. “The government
responded to the recommendations by setting up a Resource Evaluation and
Planning division in 1976, and issued the landmark policy for Resource
Management of the Eastern Slopes a year later.”
“That policy again put watershed protection first in
priority above all other uses, aggressively prescribing the kinds of activities
and developments permitted in each land-use zone.” However, the heads of
government department and business lobby groups soon began asking for fewer
restrictions. The result? The business-oriented Progressive Conservatives
released a more development-friendly version of the policy
in 1984. “Even with new loopholes for exploitation of wood, gravel, oil and gas
and other resources, the revised Eastern Slopes Policy once more affirmed
watershed protection as the highest policy priority,” Tighem said. Then, 30
years later, “the South Saskatchewan regional plan replaced the Eastern Slopes
Policy, but not its priority for watershed health.” With the wryest irony, he
wrote that “with so much emphasis on watershed values over most of the last
century, one might expect the headwaters of our prairie rivers to be in good
condition and our water future secured. One would be wrong.”[122]
In a recent report on water use at the
beginning of the 21st Century, Alberta Environment described the uses
for water that result in it being removed from the water cycle. “These include
the deep well disposal of industrial wastewaters,” the department wrote. Other water
uses include washing salt caverns from underwater salt deposits, and for the
enhanced recovery of oil through water and steam injection. For these and other
uses, the operator requires a license.
At the time, Alberta Environment
issued licences for water use in Alberta and kept records of the water
allocated. Water allocations were based on the expected maximum amount that an
applicant might require, and they were often greater than the volumes actually
used. To illustrate, up to yearend 2001, Alberta had allocated more than 9.4
billion cubic metres of water annually for a variety of uses. Allocations from
surface water sources accounted for 98 per cent of this total; groundwater
sources, the rest.
Of those volumes, oil and gas sector
licenses represented 4.6 per cent of total allocations, with about two per cent
allocated for water and steam injection operations. By comparison, the
agriculture sector (including irrigation) received the largest allocations, at
approximately 46 per cent. Municipal water supplies accounted for 11 per cent.
Of the total provincial water allocations,
the oil and gas sector used less than half of one per cent for water and steam
injection processes (enhanced oil recovery). At that time, the amount of water
used for these purposes declined from 88.7 million cubic metres in 1973 to 47.5
million cubic metres in 2001. A great deal of that water was not potable. While
37 million cubic metres of the total was fresh, 10.5 million was salty and/or
brackish.
According to Alberta’s Water Act,
agricultural, industrial, municipal and other non-domestic water users must
apply to Alberta Environment for a licence to divert and use an annual
allocation of water. Allocations reflected the 1894 “first-in-time,
first-in-right” principle, for both surface and groundwater resources. This
principle in effect honours the seniority of the license. Households that are
not part of a municipal water system can use up to 1,250 cubic metres of water
per year, from any source (well, stream or lake) accessible at that location. Household
water use is a statutory right and has the highest priority of all water
diversions. Before it will approve an application to divert water, the
department wrote, it “reviews the application to ensure existing water users’
rights are protected, that water is available to meet the needs of the
applicant,” and that diversion would have minimal impacts on the aquatic
environment.
This provincial commentary reflected a
2002-2003 public consultation called Water
for Life: Alberta’s
Strategy for Sustainability.
According to the department, people at the hearings expressed concern that population
growth, droughts and agricultural and industrial development were putting
greater pressure on Alberta’s water supplies. While the report reiterated that
the quantity of water used for enhanced oil recovery represented a small and
declining portion of available supplies, there was a lot of concern about enhanced
oil recovery removing water from the hydrological cycle. In addition, the
report said, there were disparities between the resources of farmers and
industrial users to look into the future.
Throughout the 1990s the pace of industrial,
agricultural and municipal development in Alberta was strong, with the result
that the provinces fully allocated water rights from many rivers – particularly
in southern regions of the province. These developments also put pressure on
groundwater and surface water resources in areas of intensive energy
development. Further, there were consecutive years of drought in 2000-2001. The
world was becoming increasingly aware of a future in which the unpredictable
impacts of global warming/climate change on the planet’s future, and many
pressures began to stress the importance of reducing per unit water consumption
during petroleum consumption.
Alberta’s approach to dealing with
these issues took the form of a strategic plan which went under the moniker Water
for Life: Alberta’s Strategy for Sustainability. This non-binding strategic
plan outlined Alberta’s vision for water management, which centred around three
primary goals: safe, secure drinking water; reliable, quality water supplies
for a sustainable economy; and healthy aquatic ecosystems. The strategy laid
out short-, medium-, and long-term implementation targets that were to extend
over a ten-year period. To achieve these goals, Water for Life focused on
research and the acquisition of data and knowledge; the implementation of water
conservation measures; and, the establishment of three kinds of multi-stakeholder
partnerships: the Alberta Water Council; Watershed Planning and Advisory
Councils; and Watershed Stewardship Groups.
This effective initiative summarized
its results in typically bureaucratic words. “Water for Life was created
through a consultative process involving key stakeholders,” said the executive
summary of the final report. “The process had three major components: idea
generation; public outreach and consultation; and a ministerial forum on water.
The idea generation stage took place in March and April of 2002. Follow-up
public consultation occurred across the province through 15 community
workshops. Public concerns also were captured during this process through 1,000
telephone surveys and 2,100 questionnaire-style workbooks.”
As the report continued, “A Minister’s
Forum: Case Studies on Water took place in June, 2002 and involved 117
participants representing diverse water interests who attended at the
invitation of the cross government working group. In small working groups and
in open plenary sessions, the participants worked to review the input from the
first two stages of the process and to discuss next steps and emergent
priorities. After reviewing the outputs of all three rounds of consultation, a
cross-ministry working group compiled and developed a draft water strategy,
which was released for discussion in March, 2003. The final Water for Life
Strategy was released in November, 2003.”
“Nearly 600,000 rural residents in
Alberta depend on groundwater from a single well or aquifer for their household
needs, and many farms also use groundwater to water livestock. In general,
household and farm wells are not monitored for declining performance and users
may not be prepared for fluctuations in water availability,” according to the report.
By contrast, industry keeps a close eye on supply. Oilfield users maintain ‘standby’
wells that can be brought on rapidly if a casing or pump failure occurs, for
example. “Industrial users monitor the performance of wells and aquifers
frequently to ensure an uninterrupted water supply,” and some industrial
operations ensure their supplies by building pipelines to rivers that can
provide sustainable supplies during drought. Thus, “there is potential for
conflict between individual water supplies and larger scale users.” Bigger
operations can afford to drought-proof their water supplies.
Effective March 29, 2014, the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) took over
jurisdictional responsibility for water and the environment with respect to
energy resource activities in Alberta from Alberta Environment and Sustainable
Resource Development.
[123]
Many people
first heard the news of Alberta’s great flood from emergency broadcasts, as
radio stations interrupted their regular programming with alerts that a sour
gas leak in Turner Valley, near Calgary, presented a danger to the public. What
began with a rainstorm soon became a national wake-up call about the inherent
risks of hydrocarbon transport.
Torrents
of water had scoured the pipelines, and a fracture in a Turner Valley line
released a potentially dangerous amount of hydrogen sulphide. The operator
quickly shut in the source, but the rains continued. Within days, Calgary and
nearby communities found themselves inundated, with water damage that few
people in the region had ever experienced.
The flood was hardly the first to hit Calgary. In June 2005, a major
flood in caused the city’s reservoir to exceed its capacity. The excess spilled
over the dam and into the river. The flow downstream increased from its normal
average of 20-30 cubic metres per second up to 350 cubic metres per second.
The Alberta government estimated the floods in the area to be the
heaviest in at least two centuries. One result was an Alberta Disaster Recovery
Program. Based on a federal/provincial cost sharing agreement, it would assist
municipalities with the costs they had incurred. The program covered the
territory from Red Deer south to the US Border and from Crowsnest Pass east to
Medicine Hat. Flood damage costs to the City of Calgary were estimated at $75
million, including $20 million to provincially held infrastructure ($7.5
million for Fish Creek alone). Some roads were closed and 2,000 Calgarians who
lived downstream required evacuation. The Glenmore water treatment plant had
difficulty treating the heavily silted water, which caused the municipal
government to issue water restrictions.
Of course, this was hardly southern Alberta’s first flood. In the Glenbow
Museum’s archives there are 120 photos of previous floods, dating back to 1897,
and prompt evacuation by provincial authorities helped keep the death toll
down. During the 2005 event, though, many people lost homes, businesses,
vehicles and other private property.
In the days
leading up to June 19, 2013, Alberta experienced heavy rainfall that triggered
catastrophic flooding described by the provincial government as the worst in
Alberta’s history. Water began to spill over the banks of the Bow, Elbow,
Highwood, Red Deer, Sheep, Little Bow, and South Saskatchewan rivers and their
tributaries. Thirty-two declarations of local emergency resulted in the
activation of 28 emergency operations centres. As water levels rose, the
province ordered people at risk in communities throughout the south of the
province to evacuate.
Five people died as a direct result of the flooding, which displaced more
than 100,000 people; 2,200 Canadian Forces troops were deployed to help in
flooded areas, using Coyote reconnaissance vehicles, Bison armoured vehicles,
G-Wagen Jeeps, and other military vehicles. Total damage estimates exceeded C$5
billion. In terms of insurable damages, at the time these floods were the
costliest disaster in Canadian history, at $1.7 billion.
Receding waters gave way to a mammoth cleanup of affected areas, aided by a
spontaneous volunteer campaign in which many home owners were assisted by
complete strangers.
At the peak of the flooding, the Bow and Elbow rivers were flowing
through Calgary at three times their peak levels from a 2005 flood, which caused
$400 million in damages. By June 21
st, the flow rate on the Bow
River had reached 1,458 cubic metres per second – five times its normal rate
for that time of year. The Elbow and Highwood Rivers reached flow rates of cubic
metres per second (inside Calgary) and 734 cubic metres per second – ten times
their time-of-year averages. According to data tracked by Alberta’s Ministry of
Environment and Sustainable Resource Development,] “in the space of a day or
two, the flows of the three rivers rocketed up five to 10 times their normal
rates.”
[124]
The mountain towns of Banff and Canmore were cut off from neighbouring
communities after flooding and mudslides forced the closure of the Trans-Canada
Highway. Concerned about a planned release of water from the Dickson Dam into
the Red Deer River, The City of Red Deer was the most northerly to declare a
state of emergency during these times. Among other communities to declare a
state of emergency was the Siksika First Nation – 95 kilometres east of Calgary,
three kilometres south of the TransCanada Highway. In response to water damage
to homes, the community evacuated 1,000 of its 6,000 souls.
As communities began to flood, displacing people in low-lying areas, area
residents mobilized to offer support and assistance to evacuees and emergency
response personnel. Volunteers and several police officers worked long hours to
help evacuation efforts despite knowing their own homes had been damaged or
completely washed away. While coverage of the flooding spread through social
media sites, many people and businesses used Facebook and Twitter to offer
accommodation and assistance to neighbours and strangers with inundated homes.
The city’s largest indoor arena, the Scotiabank Saddledome, suffered a
great deal of damage with flood waters reaching the lowest ten rows of seats. Likewise
the adjacent Calgary Stampede grounds – also severely flooded – less than two
weeks before the opening of the city’s annual exhibition and rodeo.
Calgary’s central business district, home to most of Canada’s oil company
headquarters, remained inaccessible until June 26th. Underground parkades were
flooded, as was a natural gas-fuelled electricity plant. Imperial Oil, Suncor
and other companies made arrangements to maintain essential operations, with employees
working from other locations.
On June 27, the Bonnybrook railway bridge collapsed under the weight of a
Canadian Pacific freight train. One of the pilings of the 101-year-old rail
bridge had been scoured by floodwaters on the Bow River and undermined. The
scouring took place under water, creating river conditions that prevented CPR
officials from inspecting for damage. The buckled bridge caused the train to
derail. As the train was carrying hazardous petrochemicals, authorities ordered
evacuation for the local area and regions downstream. Slowly, operators pumped the
rail cars dry, and then brought them back to dry land.
The city of Medicine Hat, located on the South Saskatchewan River
downstream from the confluence of the Bow and Oldman rivers, was also hit with
significant flooding. The city evacuated 10,000 residents ahead of the
flooding, and facilities including the Medicine Hat Arena began to flood on
June 23rd. The South Saskatchewan River peaked at 5,460 cubic metres per second
at Medicine Hat – below some predictions, but still the highest water flow for
that city on record.
South of
Calgary, the town of High River was evacuated after flooding of the Highwood
River caused water to rise over the top of vehicles in the town’s main streets
and necessitated the rescue of over 150 people from the rooftops of their
homes. 350 Canadian Forces personnel and 80 Royal Canadian Mounted Police
officers were dispatched to assist with rescue efforts. Members of the Alberta
Sheriffs Branch were also involved in this effort. All 13,000 residents of High
River were ordered to evacuate on June 20, and the community was largely
abandoned within three days as the town suffered what local officials called “unprecedented”
damage.
Everyone who was there has a story to tell. Take Cam Moore, for example.
He’s president of the geophysical contractors’ association. “[My wife and I]
worked hard to hook up generators and pumps to keep flood waters back and [our
subdivision in High River] had a really effective emergency response plan,” he told
me in an email. “By Sunday, water had receded significantly and we were
actually able to drive out of our neighborhood which had been completed
surrounded by raging water.
“As we drove through town, I can’t begin to describe what I saw,” he
continued. “There was total devastation and destruction everywhere we looked.
Think apocalypse. Tanks, helicopters and emergency vehicles [were] everywhere.
It was as close to a war zone as I have ever been. Our town is destroyed and
our community knocked down to its very core….We cried uncontrollably as we
left…wondering if we would ever see our friends and neighbours again.”
[125]
For the petroleum sector, the effects of the disaster reached at least as
far as the Northwest Territories. “We are working on a project in the central
Mackenzie valley,” said a company source whom I contacted at the time, and who
requested anonymity. “The timing is very tight. Unfortunately, operations up
there can occur only in a short winter window so if you are at a critical point
and are delayed, the consequence is potentially missing an entire year. To make
a long story short, one of our key staff members on the project lives in [the
Mission district of Calgary] and had to rush home in response to the disaster.
This delay may prove fatal to our hopes of getting some preliminary work done
up there this summer which will, in turn, preclude us from moving forward on a
drilling program next winter. So in this case it isn’t just a matter of pushing
things a few weeks or months – it can involve much bigger chunks of time. It’s
sort of like missing the bus and having to wait until the next one comes along.”
[126]
Another anonymous source observed that the federal tax authorities were
almost unique in providing ham-handed, dunderheaded guidance. At the end of
June, when the flood was at full crest and most buildings downtown were without
power and other utilities, the CRA sent a note to oil industry taxation people
saying that, though corporate taxes were due on July 2nd, ‘any taxpayer that
misses a filing deadline that is attributable to the flooding can request a
waiver of any penalties and/or interest to the Tax Services Branch of the TRA.”
Large legal and accounting firms protested loudly, of course, and the feds
extended the deadline by a month.
[127]
In strictly economic terms, most of the needed spending on recovery was
non-productive. Like Japan’s response to the 2011 tsunami, economic activity
related to rebuilding is measurable as a boost to GDP, but amounts to spending
money on restoring things to what they used to be. Todd Hirsch, an economist
with Calgary-based ATB Financial, calls this phenomenon the GDP paradox. “Why
is it that natural disasters (which are plainly bad) can boost the GDP (which
is perceived as good)?” he asked. “The lift in economic activity that sometimes
follows a disaster underscores why the gross domestic product is not a good
indicator of societal welfare.”
[128]
Although total
damage caused by the flooding remained unknown, On June 24, 2013 Premier Alison
Redford predicted that cleanup would surpass the $700 million caused by the
Slave Lake fire, with much of the cost likely to be uninsurable.
For rural
communities in particular, big fires can lead to the destruction of property.
In 2011, for example, a bush fire torched the Town of Slave Lake, with 40 per cent of
its structures going up in smoke. During that time there was another “huge
fire, 600,000 hectares—it was a huge fire” – near Fort McMurray, several
hundred kilometres away.[129]
Insurance companies paid $742 million to settle claims related to those fires[130]
– small change compared to what was to come
For his part, Minister of Municipal Affairs Doug Griffiths said a task
force representing numerous government agencies and which earned praise for its
coordination of recovery efforts following the 2011 Slave Lake wildfire would
be reconvened. John McGowan, CEO of the Alberta Urban Municipalities
Association described how his organization was applying what they learned from
the $700-million clean-up process following the Slave Lake fire in 2011 in
their response to the flood. McGowan explained how AUMA subsidiary Alberta
Municipal Services Corporation would provide a wide variety of services which
include general insurance to the approximately 278 cities, towns and villages
in Alberta affected by the flood. Damaged public buildings, vehicles and key
public infrastructure, including subsidiary damage such as, structural damage
to bridges or tunnels, need to be repaired or replaced in the “biggest cleanup
in provincial history”.
In Calgary as everywhere else in the flooded areas, neighbours,
strangers, friends, and friends-of-friends-of-friends helped those whose homes
were damaged. Calgary’s first official call, early on the morning of June 24,
for 600 volunteers resulted in an estimated 2,500 people arriving ready to
work.
Upon touring
the affected areas, Alberta Premier Alison Redford who represents the
Calgary-Elbow riding, promised provincial assistance in recovery efforts. The
Alberta Treasury board met early on June 24 to approve a preliminary $1 billion
emergency fund for the disaster recovery program, covering immediate clean-up
and repair costs. Losses to home owners and municipalities caused by overland
flooding, not covered by regular insurance, will be covered by the province.
While making the funding announcement Premier Redford cautioned that it could
take up to ten years to fully recover from the disaster.
A state of emergency for Siksika First Nation, east of Calgary, was
declared in the evening of June 20 with approximately one thousand people
evacuated from their homes. By June 23, with 200 homes still underwater, Chief
Fred Rabbitcarrier told CTV that there was a “feeling of hopelessness.” Soon
news outlets began to cover the story. Relief efforts, donations and volunteers
quickly responded to the community’s call for help.
In November 2013, the Government of Alberta announced various projects to
mitigate future flooding within Calgary and High River. The projects include
construction of a channel to divert water around High River and a dry dam for
the Elbow River west of Bragg Creek, which is upstream of Calgary. A grant was
also announced for Calgary to investigate construction of a 5 km (3.1 mi)
tunnel to divert Elbow River flood waters away from neighbourhoods.
[131]
An early estimate from BMO Capital Markets estimated the cost of these
losses as ranging from $3-$5 billion. The outpouring of selfless courage and
support from friends, neighbours and strangers was a partial offset.
[132]
Years later the
clean-up continued. For example, in mid-summer 2017 the town of High River
announced it would invest $360,000 to clean and restore the Upper Little Bow
wetland to pre-flood conditions. The community’s parks planning group developed
the strategy to “improve the overall health and function of the natural green
space. Kim Unger, parks planning supervisor for the Town of High River.
“The main objective of the project is restore the wetland ... by removing
the debris, garbage, sediments, and silting deposited by the flood event of
2013,” Kim Unger told council. “This will be achieved by deepening the channel
bed bottom and installing stormwater management facilities to treat storm
run-off discharging into the system. Areas of riparian and wetland vegetation
will augment the system. This reach/wetland is currently separate from the
downstream reaches, with no flowing water within them.”
“The [2013] flood exacerbated the
situation, making this project even more important today,” she said. Unger said
the parks people would complete the project in two phases. The first would
involve dredging the Upper Little Bow’s channel bottom to remove waste. The
town would then develop an upper and lower “forebay” – an artificial pool of
water used to treat storm water and to restrict sediment from entering the
system. It would also serve as a buffer during !high water events” – also known
as flooding.
[133]
The year
2010 was a watershed for industry people who specialize in oil spill prevention
and recovery. BP oversaw management of the biggest blowout in history. Well
control and cleanup cost BP US$54 billion, plus US$18.7 billion to settle other
claims. These events coincided with an Enbridge pipeline spill. Though a far
smaller catastrophe, that spill became history’s most expensive oil spill
clean-up operation.[134]
Also
in that year, the National Energy Board gave conditional approval for Enbridge
to construct its Northern Gateway pipeline. As one of its conditions, though,
the regulator instructed the company to establish a research program into the
behaviour and cleanup (including recovery) of oils spilled in watery
environments.
This
reflected the newsworthiness of the two big spills. However, it also recognized
the fact that, although oil spills are rare, when y happen they become
hot-button issues in the news. Coverage of these worst-on-record events made it
clear that, no matter what precautions the industry takes, oil does spill into
streams, lakes and the sea.
The
NEB condition prompted CAPP and the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association to ask
the Royal Society of Canada to supervise a peer-reviewed study into the
accidental release of oil into water and wetlands. The seven panel members had
world-class credentials, and represented universities and scientific
organizations from Canada, America and Australia. The researchers completed and
released the report – it bears the yawning title Behaviour and Environmental
Impacts of Crude Oil Released into Aqueous Environments – in less than two
years.
The chair: Kenneth Lee, the Canadian oil spill
recovery expert who chaired the project, is director of Oceans and Atmosphere
for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in
Perth, Australia. He left Canada four years ago after seeing his federal
research lab in Dartmouth, N.S downsized in a budget cut – even though his
experience was such that he played a role in mitigating the 2010 Deepwater
Horizon disaster.
As
a scientist involved in the development and application of oil spill
counter-measures, US Government agencies had asked him to work with a science
team monitoring the effectiveness and potential environmental impacts of the
clean-up of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster in the Gulf of
Mexico. “I witnessed how the spill affected the region’s environment and the
surrounding local communities,” he told his audience in Calgary.
“In
the past, industry-research partnerships focused on improving production
technologies and solutions,” he wrote by way of introducing himself to his
CSIRO colleagues. However, that has changed. “Our focus for oil and gas
research now includes environmental, economic and social factors, including
risk assessments for regulatory approval, exploration, production,
transportation, decommissioning, and emergency response to spills and
mitigation.”
Even
though Lee had pulled up stakes and moved to Australia, his peers asked him to
chair Canada’s oil spill study. Last November he presided over the release of
the extensive report (it’s available online) at a talk to industry specialists.
“Do
we know enough about how crude oils behave when released into fresh waters,
estuaries or oceans to develop effective strategies for spill preparedness,
spill response and remediation?” he asked. “What are our gaps in knowledge, and
how should research inform policy, regulation and practice?” he asked. Briefly,
those were the questions the researchers set out to answer.
Cutting to the chase: “Leading
experts on oil chemistry, behaviour, and toxicity reviewed the science relevant
to potential oil spills into Canada’s lakes, waterways, wetlands, and offshore,”
Lee said. The task force examined the impacts of spills and oil spill responses
for everything from pentanes and light oil to bitumen and dilbit and other
unconventional oils. It surveyed scientific literature and key reports and oil
spill case studies. They consulted industry, government, and environmental
stakeholders. While most of the spills they studied took place in Canada, some
were out of the country – for example, the accidental release of dilbit into a
tributary of Michigan’s Kalamazoo River from a two-metre rupture in an Enbridge
pipeline. Cleanup took two years, and cost US$765 million.
Each
crude oil type has its own chemical “fingerprints,” Lee said, and those
fingerprints determine how readily spilled oil spreads, sinks and disperses,
how it affects aquatic critters and wildlife, and how long it takes for biodegradation
of the oil to start. For the most part, oil’s impact on water depends on
weather and waves, and how quickly clean-up operations begin.
The
result is technical coverage of saltwater straits, freshwater lakes, running
rivers and dense wetlands. Each is home to distinctive geologic features, but
also to microorganisms that can transform oil as it spills and spreads. Those
microscopic bugs degrade different oil types in a variety of ways, and their
impact is often an important part of oil spill cleanup strategies. “Sunlight,
wind, waves, and weather conditions can physically and chemically transform a
spill,” the report says. “These changes to the chemistry of oil are crucial
factors affecting how spilled oil spreads, affects aquatic organisms and people,
or lingers in the environment.”
Oil
spills are infrequent, according to the report, “and the probability of spills
decreases with increasing spill size.” Despite the relative infrequency of
crude oil spills into water, they can have big impacts economically, and from
the perspectives of human health, safety and the environment. These realities
raised many questions, and they demanded study.
Biodegradation: As
technical as its title, the report set out to answer six questions, and uses
240,000 words to do so. Here is a summary of its first three conclusions.
To
begin, the science is limited to a large degree because of the chemical
degradation that takes place as oil in water weathers. However, “the initial
and ultimate fate” of all oil types is strongly affected by season and weather.
“The lighter the oil, the more it is affected by spreading and evaporation and
the easier it is to treat effectively,” says the report. These processes slow
down as the oil gets heavier. Heavy oil and bitumen-type oils, which have fewer
water-soluble components, are more resistant to evaporation and biodegradation.
Thus, “their potential long-term damage to the environment, waterfowl and
fur-bearing animals is greater,” and cleanup is extremely difficult.
Another
key question was how the different forms of oil affected different water
ecosystems. Most of the creatures living in water are victims of some degree of
habitat destruction from oil spills but the largest group of studies available
had to do with the impact of spills on fish. Many of the studies available
concerned fish, but in this case, spills of light oil are the cause. “Observed
fish kills are typically brief and localized because of the rapid loss of
[acutely lethal low molecular weight oil components] through dilution and
weathering,” the authors wrote. They cautioned, however, about extensive fish
mortalities “observed in rivers where a point source of oil was rapidly
transported downstream before significant weathering occurred.”
The
microbiologists on the team wanted to know how these ubiquitous creatures
affect the properties of spilled oil, its persistence and its toxicity. Once
again, they reported that light oils are more biodegradable than heavier oils
and leave lighter residues. Smaller proportions of heavy crudes are readily
biodegradable, and their residues persist in the environment even after
cleanup. Ironically, they observe that, an area which has been the site of
previous spills may begin biodegradation of a new spill quite quickly. The idea
is that microbes in existing oil residues would rapidly begin to multiply,
consuming the new oil. That said, the researchers worried about the impact of
microbial processes on diluted bitumen. The alkalinity of diluents could kill
off some forms of microbe.
Oil spill response: Behind
the endless science in this report, of course, is the technical information
needed to contribute to oil spill containment and recovery practice, and the
balance of the report focuses in that area. After urging further biodegradability
studies, the report discusses the use of oil dispersants for spill response,
and discusses the use of mathematical tools to optimize doses, logistics and
operations used to apply them. It also argues for “more effective and
eco-friendly” dispersants.
What’s
more, the oil spill recovery techniques in use today – for example, the use of
booms, in-situ burning, skimming, dispersion and bioremediation – have a lot of
limitations. They aren’t easily adaptable for cold waters and Arctic
environments, for example. Among a truckload of other recommendations, the
researchers recommend more field trials to advance spill response practices – “especially
for subsurface blowouts, Arctic oil spills and freshwater shorelines.”
And
in the spirit of good science, of course, they called for new studies to fill
in the gaps, identifying seven areas where industry, government and academic
institutions need to do more work. New work is coming from many research teams
and funding agencies. As importantly, it is leading to technologies and other
approaches to watershed management that reduce water-body contamination.[135]
Take
the case of operations that develop resources through fracking. President of
the Canadian Society for Unconventional Resources Kevin Heffernan describes many
ways his industry – a big water user – is “greening” its use of water. “You can
reduce water use by injecting the water where it’s needed only, and there are
technologies like the ‘sliding sleeve’ which enables you to inject water,
chemicals and other materials only where you will get maximum production.”
Eric
Schmelz – a vice president of NCS Multistage, which deploys this technology – said
that providing precise positioning in the horizontal wellbore can “reduce by up
to 50 percent the amount of fluid needed for fracking using the old methods.
More typically, it involves a 30 to 40 percent reduction.”
A smattering of advocates: Consider
a study sponsored by WaterSmart, a Calgary-based not-for-profit focused on
efficient water consumption, and CCEMC, an industry-funded corporation which
helps finance environment-related science. “Alberta’s social, economic and
environmental history and heritage is directly tied to its water resources.”
Although powered by hydrocarbons, “Alberta’s economy runs on water,” it says. “Water
availability constrains and challenges economic and population growth
throughout the province.”
WaterSmart’s
executive director, Kim Sturgess, said good water management is less about
technology, more about cooperation among the people who work and live in a
given area. “The watershed management plan, and cooperation among the
communities that need the water and use it – those are the key concerns that I
have.” Everyone in the province has a stake in clean water, and “we need to
work together to sustain the resiliency of Alberta’s water supplies and the
communities (including industry) that need them.”
She
also worried that the water used to produce the oil sands comes mostly from
underground aquifers. “Groundwater aquifers are not well understood in this
province,” she said. “There are pockets in Alberta where the groundwater is
well known but overall that is not the case.” She is especially concerned about
the management of the downhole aquifers tapped for steam-assisted gravity
drainage (SAGD) operations.
Steam
Assisted Gravity Drainage (see graphic) is an enhanced oil recovery technology
for producing heavy crude oil and bitumen. It uses steam stimulation in which a
pair of horizontal wells is drilled into the oil reservoir, one a few metres
above the other. High-pressure steam is continuously injected into the upper
wellbore to heat the oil and reduce its viscosity, causing the heated oil to
drain into the lower wellbore, where it is pumped out. Steam Assisted Gravity
Drainage and Cyclic Steam Stimulation (CSS) are two heat-based recovery processes
for use in the oil sands.
According
to Brett Purdy of Alberta Innovates, a provincial think-tank, one consortium was
testing a zero-liquid-discharge water treatment system. Now under construction,
the test unit will produce “solid salt rather than liquid brine” from
contaminated or processed water at a SAGD facility. Compared to conventional
treatment, “the pilot is likely to discharge less wastewater, and withdraw less
freshwater from nearby reservoirs,” he said.[136]
Oil
sands development in Alberta requires a great deal of water from streams and
rivers. Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage is an enhanced oil recovery technology
for producing heavy crude oil and bitumen. It uses steam stimulation in which a
pair of horizontal wells is drilled into the oil reservoir, one a few metres
above the other. High-pressure steam is continuously injected into the upper
wellbore to heat the oil and reduce its viscosity, causing the heated oil to
drain into the lower wellbore, where it is pumped out. Steam Assisted Gravity
Drainage and Cyclic Steam Stimulation (CSS) are two heat-based recovery
processes for use in the oil sands. Both approaches use water for oil recovery.
In
2012, a group of companies responded to public concern about their use of water
by creating the Canadian Oil Sands Innovation Alliance. According to the
organization’s Water Environment Priority Area (EPA), “Water is a high-value
commodity and COSIA’s Water Environment Priority Area (EPA) is looking for
innovative and sustainable solutions to reduce water use and to increase water
recycling rates at oil sands mining and in situ operations in order to achieve
our Aspiration to “be world leaders in water management, producing Canadian
energy with no adverse impact on water.”
Oil sands development in Alberta requires a great deal of
water from streams and rivers. Today, there are primarily two
uses of water. Steam Assisted
Gravity Drainage is an enhanced oil recovery technology for
producing heavy crude oil and bitumen. It uses steam stimulation in which a
pair of horizontal wells is drilled into the oil reservoir, one a few metres
above the other. High-pressure steam is continuously injected into the upper
wellbore to heat the oil and reduce its viscosity, causing the heated oil to
drain into the lower wellbore, where it is pumped out. Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage and Cyclic Steam Stimulation (CSS)
are two heat-based recovery processes for use in the oil sands. Both approaches
use water for oil recovery.
The
oil sands industry created COSIA, the Canadian Oil Sands Innovation Alliance,
in 2010 as the coordinator of technology sharing and research efforts; Alan
Fair became director of its tailings EPA – an acronym for “environmental
priority area.” Before joining the organization, Fair had spent 32 years at
Syncrude. “I retired from Syncrude in order to start the Oil Sands Tailings
Consortium which was then integrated into COSIA to become the Tailings EPA,” he
said. “By background I’m a geotechnical engineer, so I definitely know the
tailings thing. I worked on it off and on for thirty-odd years at Syncrude.”
To
stress how important the tailings file had become, he offered a few statistics:
In 2013, alliance members invested about $80 million in environmental research
and development – a number which illustrated that “significant
dollars are being spent by the companies to develop these technologies. That’s
strictly R&D. So, there’s considerably more money being spent in
commercially implementing these technologies, for example. We’ve got a
substantive project portfolio on the go now – about 48 projects that
various companies are working on.”
“All
de-watering technologies to some degree rely on gravity,” Fair explained, “and
they also rely on some form of polymer.” These chemicals bind to clay
particles, with each polymer becoming a complex molecule connected to many clay
particles. Once a molecule has taken on its load of clay, it will settle more
quickly. That, he said, was the first step. From that point on there were only
a few ways to separate solids from the water. “You can use thermal
energy – heat it up and boil it off – or mechanical energy”
like centrifugal force.
“You
can also use evaporation, like what naturally occurs, and that is what
thin-lift drying does. In that particular technology you add the polymer or the
flocculent and then spread the resulting slurry in very thin layers, typically
23 centimetres thick. And, by doing that you create a large surface area that’s
exposed to the atmosphere.” Given that Fort McMurray is surrounded by wetlands,
at first it seemed surprising that these layers would dry out if left to
themselves, but it was clear that the moisture would evaporate from the
reclaimed material. “Granted, it only occurs about five or six months of the
year,” Fair said. “In the winter months there’s very little evaporation. It’s a
seasonal effort to dry them with evaporative forces.”[137]
According
to the organization’s Water Environment Priority Area (EPA), “Water is a
high-value commodity and COSIA’s Water Environment Priority Area (EPA) is
looking for innovative and sustainable solutions to reduce water use and to
increase water recycling rates at oil sands mining and in situ operations in
order to achieve our Aspiration to “be world leaders in water management,
producing Canadian energy with no adverse impact on water.”
To
achieve this organizational “aspiration,” COSIA has two performance goals for in situ and mining water use. The
organization expects its members, which include in situ and mining operators, to do the following: In situ operators should strive to
reduce freshwater use intensity by 50 per cent by 2022,[138] while
members with mining operations - Syncrude, for example - should reduce the net water use
intensity from the Athabasca River and its tributaries by 30 per cent by 2022.[139]
For
its part, COSIA’s Water EPA identified additional key issues facing the
industry and is working to address the following:[140]
1.
Accelerating the development and
commercialization of water treatment technologies;
2.
Creating a collaborative regional water
management solution that links mining and in situ supply/demand;
3.
Developing game-changing steam generation
technology to reduce water used to produce steam for in situ oil sands
development; and
4.
Improving the use and management of all water
resources, fresh, saline and recycled;
5.
Managing salt accumulation in water streams on
mine sites during active mining.
The
evidence seems clear that global warming and climate change are influencing the
environment in profound ways. The world’s cryosphere (frozen regions, including
Alberta glaciers) is melting. Worldwide, lands that were once agriculturally
productive are falling victim to desertification and flooding, and this reality
is likely to become more severe. This is fundamentally affecting fresh water
supplies and the habitat of many species – trout and other fish, for example.
As we have seen, southern Canada is prone to floods in every region. This
manuscript has discussed numerous floods in Alberta, but they have occurred
across the country. In each case, it was it was déjà vu all over again, as
baseball legend Yogi Berra would have put it. So were the responses of
government and the people affected by them.
As
I was preparing this manuscript, more floods took place – in this instance, the
worst were in the Maritime Provinces and in Québec, and they
stirred a great deal of news, including television footage of people steering
boats down major roads, and even the proposition that home and office
construction on flood plains should be immediately banned – a regulation that
would put an end, for example, to building in downtown Calgary.
In
an article, Glenn McGillivray – managing
director of the Toronto-based Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction –
described flooding and its aftermath as occurring in almost a formulaic way. “Once
again, homes located alongside a Canadian river have flooded, affected
homeowners are shocked, the local government is wringing its hands, the respective
provincial government is ramping up to provide taxpayer-funded disaster
assistance and the feds are deploying the Armed Forces,” he wrote. “Then the
snow melts, the ice jams or the rain falls and the flood comes,” and the media
describe the rain as being “far outside the norm.” but a scientific or
engineering analysis later shows that it wasn’t all that exceptional.
“These
events are not caused by the rain,” he said, but by poor land-use decisions and
“other public-policy foibles. This is what is meant when some say there are no
such things as natural catastrophes, only man-made disasters.” The next step in
the cycle is for the province to step in with disaster assistance, then to seek
“reimbursement from the federal government through the Disaster Financial
Assistance Arrangements. In any case, whether provincial or federal, taxpayers
are left holding the bag.”
“So
what is the root of the problem?” he asked. “Though complex problems have
complex causes and complex solutions, one of the causes is that the party
making the initial decision to allow construction (usually the local
government) is not the party left holding the bag when the flood comes.”
Cities, towns and rural municipalities “face far more upside risk than downside
risk when it comes to approving building in high-risk hazard zones. When the
bailout comes from elsewhere, there is no incentive to make the right decision
– the lure of an increased tax base and the desire not to anger local voters is
all too great.” To break the cycle of natural disasters like floods leading to
regional disasters which the taxpayer must ultimately pay for means “taking a
link out of the chain of events that leads to losses,” he said. “Local
governments eager for growth and the tax revenue that goes with it need to hold
some significant portion of the downside risk in order to give them pause for
thought. Enough, at least, so they may think twice about making risky decisions
that put people and property directly at risk.”[141]
The people disagree
The
evidence strongly suggests we have water problems, and that they are likely
related to climate change. Polling says the people of Canada agree, but puts
the question in a larger context. According to a poll taken year after year, economic
issues and healthcare are “among the most important, most concerning, and most
serious issues by Canadians, while water issues rate relatively lower.”
Nonetheless, according to the most recent release of these results, mare than “half
of Canadians say that the quality of water in lakes, rivers, and streams,
extreme weather causing droughts or flooding, and the long-term supply of fresh
water and quality of drinking water have become at least somewhat more serious
issues compared to ten years ago.”
As a nation, 45 percent of us view
fresh water as Canada’s most important natural resource by far. Nearly a
quarter of Canadians perceive oil and gas to be the most important natural
resource, up slightly in 2017. Only in Alberta do perceptions of oil and gas
(57%) outrank fresh water (27%) as Canada’s most important resource.
Most
Canadians (60%) say an abundant fresh water supply is “very important” to
Canada’s national economy, but this is down from 70 percent in 2008. “This
ten-point gap is significant and suggests a need for better advocacy and
communications on the importance of fresh water in the Canadian economy,” the
pollsters continue. Eight in ten Canadians are confident that the regions of Canada
they live in “have enough fresh water to meet long-term needs, similar to the
confidence levels ten years ago; however, only about a quarter are very
confident in Canada’s fresh water supply, despite nearly over half strongly
agreeing that Canada has more fresh water than most other places in the world
(53%).” The extensive poll is available online, and worth reviewing yourself.[142]
Alberta and climate change
|
Figure
1: The hydrologic cycle. Temperature driven transpiration, evaporation and
melting will increase with higher ambient temperatures, influencing the
entire cycle. Source: Environment and Climate Change Canada
|
It is no
coincidence all of these impacts are connected to water, as climate change has
pronounced effects on global, regional, and local water systems. These systems
directly influence our way of life because they control water flow,
availability, and quality.
1. Water quality,
2. Climate variability,
3. Extreme weather condition frequency
and/or severity, and
4. Earlier snowpack melt.
All these impacts increase risks relating to water quality, quantity, and
reliability; a direct result of the interconnectedness of the hydrological
cycle. As we become more familiar with the possible impacts of changes to
the hydrologic cycle, the question becomes: are we ready for them as best we
can be?
1. Future water supply and watershed
management
2. Healthy aquatic ecosystems
3. Water use conservation, efficiency,
and productivity, and
4. Water quality protection.
These projects aim to improve the safety and security of drinking water,
aquatic ecosystem health, and reliability of water supply for industrial uses throughout
Alberta, even as the climate changes.
Key climate and water terms[143]
Our
changing climate and its effect on our shared water resources is an
increasingly popular topic of discussion in government, academia, businesses
and households. Conversations about climate can be heavily science based, and
may frequently be accompanied by an array of terms that are critical to
understanding climate issues and their solutions.
The list
below provides brief definitions for many key climate- and water-related words.
It is intended to serve as a guide for navigating climate and water-centered
discussions. Although research and investigation done to create these
definitions was focused in Alberta, the list covers many generic terms that
apply to all Canadian provinces and the global community.
You can
also download a copy of the glossary here.
Ablation
Combined
processes (such as melting, sublimation, evaporation or calving), which remove
snow or ice from a glacier or from a snowfield. Ablation is also used to
express the quantity lost by these processes as the water equivalent of snow
cover by melting, evaporation, wind and avalanches.
Acidification
Acidification
is a process occurring in oceans, freshwaters and soil. The most common
reference is to ocean acidification, which refers to a reduction in pH of the
ocean over an extended period typically decades or longer. Acidification is
caused primarily by uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but can also
be caused by other chemical additions or subtractions to the water.
Adaptive capacity
The ability
of systems, institutions, humans, and other organisms to adjust to potential
damage, to take advantage of opportunities, or to respond to consequences.
Adaptive management
A dynamic
system or process of task organization and execution that recognizes the future
cannot be predicted perfectly. Adaptive management applies principles and
methods to improve activities incrementally as decision-makers learn from
experience, collect new scientific findings, and adapt to changing social
expectations and demands.
Adverse effect
Impairment
of or damage to the environment, human health or safety, or property.
Alkalinity
The
acid-neutralizing capacity of water, typically measured as concentration of
calcium carbonate (CaCO3). Mildly alkaline water may have a pH of 8
(neutral water has a pH of 7, while pH below 7 is acidic). Note pH (potential
of hydrogen) is a scale of acidity from 0 to 14.
Allocation (of water)
Individuals,
municipalities, businesses and others in Alberta can obtain a license from the
provincial government to divert water under the Water Act. The
diverted water is expressed as an allocation, which refers to a specific
quantity of water, maximum pumping rate and timing of pumping associated with
the license.
Ambient
Conditions
occurring before an activity occurs or upstream of a specific location. Ambient
air temperature is the temperature of the surrounding air. Ambient water
quality is the water quality in a river, lake, or other water body, as opposed
to the quality of the water being discharged.
Anoxic
The absence
of oxygen, as in bodies of water, lake sediments, or sewage. Generally, anoxic
conditions refer to a body of water sufficiently deprived of oxygen to where
Zooplankton and fish would not survive.
Aquifer
A
geological formation or structure that stores and/or transmits water, such as
to wells and springs. The term is commonly used to describe formations with
enough water to supply human use/s.
Baseflow
Sustained
flow of a stream in the absence of direct runoff from the surrounding drainage
basin. Includes natural and human-induced streamflows. Natural baseflow is
sustained largely by groundwater, which is generally sustained by snowmelt.
Baseline data
An initial
set of observations or measurements used for comparison; a starting point.
Basin
An area
having a common outlet for its surface water runoff. The land area within a
basin/watershed drains water to a stream, river, or lake (see also Watershed).
Best Management Practices (BMP)
Techniques
and procedures proven through research, testing, and use to be the most
effective and appropriate for use in each application. Effectiveness and appropriateness
are determined by a combination of: (i) the efficiency of resource use, (ii)
the availability and evaluation of practical alternatives, (iii) the creation
of social, economic, and environmental benefits, and (iv) the reduction of
negative social, economic, and environmental impacts.
Biochemical oxygen demand
A measure
of the amount of oxygen consumed by aquatic organisms in the decomposition of
organic material. The term can be used as an indicator of how much oxygen will
be removed from water and the resulting stress on the aquatic ecosystem.
Biodiversity
The
variability among living organisms from terrestrial, marine, and other
ecosystems. Biodiversity includes variability at the genetic, species, and
ecosystem levels.
Biosolids
Treated
solid or semi-solid residues generated during the treatment of domestic sewage
in a wastewater treatment facility. Primarily an organic product produced by
wastewater treatment processes.
Blackwater
Wastewater
containing excreta (urine and faecal sludge).
Carbon footprint
Conceptually,
a carbon footprint is a measure of the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by
the entity of interest, such as an individual, organization, process or
product. There is no single method for calculating and expressing a carbon
footprint, and the metric can be tailored based on the audience, available
data, and other considerations.
Carbon sequestration
Removing
carbon from the atmosphere (present as gaseous CO2) usually followed
by storage to reduce the accumulation of atmospheric CO2.
Climate
Basically
the average weather of the region of interest. More rigorously, it is a
statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant
weather characteristics over a period ranging from months to thousands or
millions of years. The classical period for averaging these variables is 30
years (World Meteorological Organization).
Climate change
Climate
change refers to a change in the state of the climate that can be identified
(e.g., by using statistical tests) by changes in the mean and/or the
variability of its properties, and that persists for an extended period,
typically on the scale of decades, centuries, or longer. Climate change can
occur naturally or as a result of human activities (see also Global
warming).
Climate feedback
An
interaction where one climate quantity causes a change in a second quantity,
which ultimately leads to another change in the first. Negative feedback is
where the initial perturbation (disturbance) is weakened by the changes it
causes. Positive feedback is where the initial perturbation is enhanced.
Climate model
A numerical
representation of the climate system based on the physical, chemical and
biological properties of its components, their interactions and feedback
processes. Climate models are applied as a research tool to study and simulate
the climate and for operational purposes, including monthly, seasonal and
inter-annual climate predictions. They may also be called General/Global
Circulation Models (GCM).
Climate variability
Climate
variability refers to natural variations in the mean state, and other
statistics on climate (such as standard deviations, occurrence of extremes,
etc.) of climate, on scales beyond individual weather events but below scales
considered for climate change. Climate variability occurs on time scales from
months to years and even decades, while weather variability occurs over hours,
weeks, and sometimes months.
Conjunctive use
The use of
more than one water source, systematically, to reduce overall environmental
impacts. For example, someone might use groundwater instead of surface water
during a drought period, and then return to using surface water when runoff
becomes available.
Conservation tillage
A tillage
practice that leaves residues on the soil surface for erosion control and water
conservation. It includes specific residue management practices, such as
no-till, mulch-till, or ridge-till.
Consumptive use
Water
consumed by humans or livestock, evaporated (e.g. via the sun), transpired
(e.g. via plant leaves), or incorporated into products or crops. This water is
not returned to the original source. Water returned to a different watershed
than the point of withdrawal (Inter-basin transfer) is not currently considered
consumptive use.
Contaminant
A substance
that, in a sufficient concentration, will cause adverse effects to water, land,
fish, or other things potentially rendering it unusable.
Cryosphere
Made of
frozen water in the form of snow, permanently frozen ground (permafrost),
floating ice, and glaciers. Fluctuations in the volume of the cryosphere cause
changes in ocean sea level, which directly impact the atmosphere and biosphere.
Cumulative effects
The
combined effects of individual projects on the environment, economy and
society. Cumulative effects could include impacts from past, present, and
foreseeable activities in a region.
Desertification
Process by
which arid or semi-arid land is transformed progressively into desert due to a
continuous lack of precipitation (water) and/or land mismanagement.
Discharge
Volume of
water flowing per unit of time, or the rate of flow. The use of this term is
not restricted to a watercourse and can be used to describe the flow of water
from a pipe, drainage basin or groundwater.
Dissolved oxygen (DO)
A
measurement of the amount of oxygen available to aquatic organisms.
Temperature, salinity, organic matter, biochemical oxygen demand, and chemical
oxygen demand affect dissolved oxygen solubility in water. Dissolved oxygen is
generally greater in colder waters with significant mixing at the air water
interface (rapids, waterfalls, etc.).
Diversion of water
Impoundment,
storage, consumption, taking or removal of water for any purpose. Does not
include water removal for the sole purpose of removing an ice jam, drainage,
flood control, erosion control or channel realignment.
Drought
A period of
abnormally dry weather long enough to cause a serious hydrological imbalance
(the rate of water loss from the area significantly exceeds the rate of water
return).
Ecological integrity
An ecosystem
exhibits integrity if, when subjected to stress, it can maintain a state that
allows the ecosystem to thrive.
Ecosystem services
Ecological
processes or functions having monetary or non-monetary value to individuals or
society at large. These are frequently classified as (i) supporting services
such as productivity or biodiversity maintenance, (ii) provisioning services
such as food, fiber, or fish, (iii) regulating services such as climate
regulation or carbon sequestration, and (iv) cultural services such as
spiritual and aesthetic appreciation.
Environmental flows
Environmental
flows describe the quantity, timing, and quality of water flows required to
sustain freshwater and estuarine (river-ocean transition zone) ecosystems, as
well as the human livelihoods and wellbeing depending on these ecosystems.
Evaporation
The process
of liquid water becoming water vapour, including vaporization from water
surfaces, land surfaces, and snowfields, but not from leaf surfaces.
Evapotranspiration
Water
withdrawn from the soil by evaporation during plant transpiration.
Feedback (feedback mechanisms)
Factors
that increase or amplify (positive feedback) or decrease (negative feedback)
the rate of a process or a system change (see also Climate feedback).
Flood
The overflowing
of normal confines of a stream or other body of water, or the accumulation of
water over areas not normally submerged. Floods include river (fluvial) floods,
flash floods, urban floods, pluvial (rain dominated) floods, sewer floods,
coastal floods, and glacial lake outburst floods.
Freshwater
Water
containing less than 4,000 milligrams per liter (mg/L) of dissolved solids.
Also referred to as ‘High Quality Non-Saline Water’ in Alberta Environment and
Parks policy documents.
Geoengineering
A broad set
of methods and technologies aiming to deliberately alter climate to alleviate
the impacts of climate change. Most, but not all, methods seek to (i) reduce
the amount of absorbed solar energy in the climate system (solar radiation
forcing) or (ii) increase net carbon sinks from the atmosphere at a scale
sufficiently large to alter climate (carbon dioxide removal). Geoengineering is
different from weather modification and ecological engineering but the
boundaries are not clear.
Global warming
Global warming
refers to the gradual increase—observed or projected—in global surface
temperature as one of the consequences due to natural internal processes or due
to changes in energy in the atmosphere (radiative forcing) caused by
anthropogenic (human) emissions.
Greywater
Wastewater
from clothes washing machines, showers, bathtubs, hand washing, and sinks.
Greywater is wastewater that does not contain faecal matter.
Groundwater
Subsurface
water. It originates from rainfall or snowmelt that penetrates the layer of
soil just below the surface. For groundwater to be a recoverable resource, it
must exist in an aquifer (see also Aquifer).
Headwaters
Upper
tributaries of a stream or river, considered the source of that
stream/river.
Hydrological cycle (the water cycle)
Water from
the ocean and other water bodies evaporates and travels through the atmosphere
as clouds, which release the water as precipitation. Precipitation over land
makes its way to streams and rivers, which carry it to the ocean or other
surface water bodies, where the cycle begins again.
Inter-basin transfer
A transfer
of water from one river basin to another. Inter-basin transfers may be tracked
or regulated for different levels of watersheds such as a hydrologic unit level
or a set of basin delineations made by a regulatory authority.
Irrigation
The
controlled application of water for agricultural purposes through human-made
systems to supply water requirements not typically satisfied by rainfall.
IWRM (Integrated Water Resource
Management)
A process
promoting the coordinated development and management of water, land, and
related resources through decisions, legislation, policies, programs and
activities across sectors, to maximise economic and social welfare in an
equitable manner without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems.
Mitigation (of climate change)
A human
intervention to reduce the sources or enhance the removal (sinks) of greenhouse
gases.
Potable water
Water
treated to provincial standards and fit for human consumption. Potable water
may also be called drinking water.
Precipitation
Total
measurable supply of water of all forms of falling moisture, including dew,
rain, mist, snow, hail, and sleet; usually expressed as a depth of liquid water
on a horizontal surface in a day, month, or year, and designated as daily,
monthly, or annual precipitation.
Recharge (of groundwater/aquifer
recharge)
Natural or
artificial introduction of water into the saturated zone of an aquifer.
Recharge results from surface water infiltrating through the soil to the water
table.
Reservoir
A pond,
lake, tank, basin, or other space, either natural in its origin or created in
whole or in part by the building of engineering structures. A reservoir stores
water. The engineering structures regulate and control water levels and flows
out of the reservoir.
Resilience
The
capacity of a system to cope with a hazardous event or disturbance, responding
or reorganizing in ways that maintain its essential function, identity, and
structure, while also maintaining the capacity for adaptation, learning, and
transformation.
River
A natural
stream of water of considerable volume, larger than a brook or creek.
Runoff
The part of
precipitation that does not evaporate and is not transpired, but flows through
the ground or over the ground surface and returns to bodies of water.
Source water
Raw/untreated
water received at a treatment facility which delivers treated water to
municipal, industrial and/or private users. Sources include groundwater,
groundwater under the influence of surface water, seawater, and surface water
from lakes, streams, rivers or other watercourses.
Sub-basin
Part of a
river basin drained by a tributary to the basin’s final outlet or with
significantly different characteristics than the other areas of the basin.
Surface water
Flowing
water present on the Earth’s surface, such as in a stream, river, lake, or
reservoir. Surface water is renewed by run-off from rain and snow each year.
Sustainability
A dynamic
process that guarantees the persistence of natural and human systems in an
equitable manner.
Sustainable development
Development
that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their own needs.
Stream
A general
term for a body of flowing water; natural watercourse containing water at least
part of the year. In hydrology, it is generally applied to the water flowing in
a natural channel as distinct from a canal.
Streamflow
General
term for water flowing in a river or watercourse that is often quantified using
discharge, or flow rate (see also Discharge).
System
A set of
connected parts or things working together as part of a complex whole.
Thermal expansion
When used
in the context of sea level, this refers to the increase in volume (and
decrease in density) that results from warming water (thermal increase).
Warming of the ocean leads to an expansion of the ocean volume and hence an
increase in sea level.
Tipping point
A level of
change in system properties beyond which a system reorganizes, often abruptly,
and does not return to the initial state even if the original drivers of the
change are removed or reduced. For the climate system, it refers to a critical
threshold when global or regional climate changes from one stable state to
another stable state.
Virtual water content
The volume
of water consumed in producing a product, measured over its full production
chain. If a nation exports/imports such a product, it exports/imports water in
virtual form. Note the water footprint of a product is a multidimensional
indicator (volume, sort of water, when and where it is used), whereas virtual
water content refers to volume alone (see also Water footprint).
Vulnerability
The
propensity or predisposition to be adversely affected. Vulnerability includes a
variety of concepts and elements including sensitivity or susceptibility to
harm and lack of capacity to cope and adapt.
Wastewater
Any
combination of the following: domestic effluent consisting of blackwater
(excreta, urine and faecal sludge) and greywater (kitchen and bathing
wastewater); water from commercial establishments and institutions, including
hospitals; industrial effluent, stormwater and other urban run-off;
agricultural, horticultural and aquaculture effluent, either dissolved or as
suspended matter.
Water footprint
The water
footprint of an individual, community or business is defined as the total
volume of freshwater used to produce the goods and services consumed by the
individual or community or produced by the business. Water use is measured in
terms of water volumes consumed (evaporated or incorporated into a product)
and/or polluted per unit of time. A water footprint can be calculated for a
single product, for any well-defined group of consumers (for example,
individual, family, city, province, state or nation) or producers.
Water quality
A term used
to describe the chemical, physical, and biological characteristics of water,
usually in respect to its suitability for a specific purpose.
Water reuse
When water
is used again after its original intended (licensed) purpose. The reuse can be
for the same or a new purpose, and includes the use of return flow, wastewater,
treated wastewater or effluent, reclaimed water, or any type of water
recycling.
Water security
The
capacity of a population to safeguard sustainable access to adequate quantities
of acceptable quality water for sustaining livelihoods, human well-being, and
socio-economic development, for ensuring protection against water-borne
pollution and water-related disasters, and for preserving ecosystems in a
climate of peace and political stability.
Watershed
An area
having a common outlet for its surface water runoff. The land area within a
basin/watershed drains water to a single body of water, such as a stream,
river, or lake (see also Basin).
Water table
Upper limit
of the zone of saturation of groundwater in the subsurface, or the top surface
of groundwater.
Weather
State of
the atmosphere over a small temporal scale, such as hours, days or weeks, as
defined by the various meteorological elements (temperature, pressure,
humidity, wind speed and direction, etc.).
Well (water well; groundwater well)
An
artificial excavation by any method for the purpose of withdrawing water from
aquifers. A bored, drilled, or driven shaft, or a dug hole whose depth is
greater than the largest surface dimension and whose purpose is to reach
underground water supplies.
Wicked problem
Issues
highly complex and resistant to resolution. Wicked problems go beyond the
capacity of a single mind or organization to understand them, often requiring
collaborative reassessment of traditional problem solving and/or behaviour to
successfully solve them.
Withdrawal
Water
removed from the ground or diverted from a surface-water source for use.
Withdrawn water can be returned to the source after use (see Consumptive
use for water that is not returned).
A
Calgary-based author, editor and writer, Peter McKenzie-Brown has worked for
several corporate clients and for industry and business publications. He has
written many articles for energy-related magazines and was coordinator and an
interviewer for the Petroleum History Society’s Oil Sands Oral History Project.
British
by birth, he is American by upbringing and Canadian by choice. He began his
writing career with the Reuters news agency in London, UK, in 1971. In Calgary
he has worked for Gulf Oil Canada, the Canadian Association of Petroleum
Producers, and Amoco Canada.
His
book Bitumen: The people, performance and
passions behind Alberta’s oil sands benefitted greatly from work conducted
under the terms of a 2012 AGLC grant.
His other books include: Footprints: The Evolution of Land Conservation and Reclamation in
Alberta (2016, with Robert Bott and Graham Chandler); Barbecues, Booms and Blogs: Fifty Years of Public Relations in Calgary
(2008; co-editor and contributor); In
Balance: An Account of Alberta’s CA Profession (2000, with Stacy Phillips);
The Richness of Discovery: Amoco’s First
Fifty Years in Canada (1998); and The
Great Oil Age: The Petroleum Industry in Canada (1993, with Gordon Jaremko
and David Finch.)
Prior
to serving as coordinator and interviewer for the Petroleum History Society’s
Oil Sands Oral History Project, he was a recipient of that society’s Lifetime
Achievement award. In 2011 he was a recipient of the society’s Article of the
Year award for a series on the oil sands, and in 2017 the society bestowed its
Book of the Year award to Footprints: The
Evolution of Land Conservation and Reclamation in Alberta.
Bibliography
Books
1.
Alberta
Environment. 2009. Summary Report: Water Supply Assessment for Alberta.
Edmonton, AB. June 2009.
3.
Armstrong,
Christopher, Matthew Dominic Evenden, and Henry Vivian Nelles. The River Returns: An Environmental History
of the Bow, 2014.
4.
Atwood,
Margaret. Survival. McClelland &
Stewart Limited, 1996.
5.
Bakker, Karen, ed. Eau Canada: The Future of Canada’s
Water, 2011.
6.
Berton,
Pierre. Niagara: A history of the falls.
McClelland & Stewart, 1992.
8.
Dekker, Dick, and Edgar T. Jones. Prairie Water: Wildlife at
Beavershills Lake, Alberta. University of Alberta, 1991, 1998, pp.138-144.
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He continued, “but never till to-night, never till now, did I go through a tempest dropping fire. Either there is a civil strife in heaven, or else the world, too saucy with the gods, incenses them to send destruction.” If that weren’t enough, he saw a common slave hold “up his left hand, which did flame and burn like twenty torches join'd, and yet his hand, not sensible of fire, remain'd unscorch'd.”
