I spent years working as a pressure welder all over the Canadian and American high Arctic. From Cape Dyer on Baffin Island Canada to being a drillship’s welder offshore north of Dead Horse City, in Prudhoe Bay Alaska USA.
From Hall Beach, Cambridge Bay, Jenny Lind Island, McKinley Bay, Cape Hopper, Broughton Island, I welded anything and everything that crawled , floated, pumped oil, water, shit, and a whole lot of ship’s bottoms. I had so many adventure I wrote about them in my first book Working North.
So I know what I’m talking about when I say that making a pipeline across the northern part of the Western Canadian Provinces and shipping our oil from Manitoba ports to the world through Hudson’s Bay can be done.
But it’s not going to be easy. Let’s take a look at three possibilities; Churchill, Port Nelson, and York Factory.
Churchill is a deep water port, with a cement dock and a established town with all the infrastructure there already. Sounds good right? Maybe not. That Churchill River just roars into Hudson Bay right through Churchill. It’s way too fast for any large ships to navigate.
Churchill is surrounded by 150Kms of muskeg, swamp. There’s a reason the Polar Bear Express train can only go 40Kms an hour. The whole dammed train sinks a couple of feet into the muskeg every time it passes. If that train ever stops for any length of time EVERYBODY sinks.
Building a pipeline to Churchill will have to entail each and every stanchion anchored in the muck to contain a mini ice plant that generates it’s own ball of ice so the pipeline won’t slowly sink into the muskeg. On the other hand the Alaska Pipeline does it so why not?
A service road beside that pipeline is why not. There’s a reason there’s no roads built up there. It’s a swamp! There’s places where contractors have over the years added 15 – 20 feet of gravel to spots and every spring the road just keeps on sinking .
Churchill’s out.
Port Nelson is only about 50 Kms from an all weather heavy-duty road that ends just down the way from Sundance, a heavy industrial hydro site. Putting an all-weather gravel road from Sundance to Port Nelson would be a summer’s work. There’s no muskeg to speak of, Port Nelson has a rail line (although old) already to it.
Except that Port Nelson has no harbor; not just a bad harbor, NO harbor. In the 1920’s there was a storm that piled ice floe on top of ice floe, and the wind and waves pushed the ice and what was left of the crushed town about a quarter mile inland. They’re still finding metal way back in the scrub from that storm.
And that river is about four feet deep at Port Nelson. They’d have to have a entire fleet of deep water dredges so that any ship, not even oil ships, to get anywhere near the Port. People may ague that New Orleans had that same problem and they solved it way back in 1825 by building underwater dams that ran 90 degrees to the Mississippi’s flow forcing all the water into a 100 foot channel. The now re-directed Mississippi dug a thirty-foot deep channel all by itself in a year.
Except Port Nelson is open to the Hudson’s Bay and we have ice floes that can be 60 feet deep, taking out any underwater dams re-directing the water.
Port Nelson or someplace more sheltered would be problematic but possible.
York Factory was the solution the Hudson’s Bay Company tried when Port Nelson’s drawbacks became apparent. It’s still on the Hayes River Delta, somewhat protected from the gales and ice floes of the Bay, on the south side of the Hayes.
York Factory, even though it’s on the same side of the river as Gillam it needs a bridge or two and an entire new road across the Hayes because of the three ports it’s got absolutely no infrastructure there. But of the three this one is the most do-able.
One day if we dream big and have the guts, a day will come when there will be a wide highway, a pipeline beside it, following alongside a navigable Hayes River to Hudson’s Bay. Barges could putter along all the way from Winnipeg across Lake Winnipeg, to the locks at Norway House on top of Lake Winnipeg. Then those barges would follow the Hayes with the highway and the pipeline beside it downriver to York Factory and the other cities springing up on Hudson’s Bay. Then all our manufactured goods and minerals and oil, would be loaded on to ocean going ships then off to be sold around the world.
Rick Ranson 