Rough-and-Tumble Times
An appeal court praises the ERCB for doing good work, but there is no end in sight to conflicts over hazardous drilling
His $1,000-a-month wage was a princely sum in the Great Depression, when even $1-a-day jobs were rare. The provincial government effectively went bankrupt by defaulting on bond interest payments and briefly levied the only unpopular sales tax in its 103-year history to meet its payroll.
Knode earned his money. The Depression-era Social Credit cabinet of Ernest Manning needed an international-class champion of the public interest in Alberta’s natural resources when the ERCB was created, originally as the Alberta Petroleum and Natural Gas Conservation Board. The late premier’s son and former national political leader, Preston Manning, recorded vivid family memories of the period in a history education video commissioned by board leaders and distributed to all staff.
The board’s first assignment was to impose order on an unruly black gold rush. It took seven years of battles after Alberta took over ownership of its natural resources from Ottawa in 1930 just to create the ERCB’s ancestor.
Pioneer entrepreneurs fought off, in the law courts as well as the political arena, all attempts to stop waste flaring of vast provincial gas wealth in order to make quick work of grabbing more valuable liquids in the Alberta industry’s first oilfield at Turner Valley. Following an old finders-keepers doctrine known as the “law of capture,” the original drillers daily burned off 250 million cubic feet of a gas layer with towering flares that could be seen from Calgary hilltops about 60 kilometers north of the wells.
Knode was a cigar-smoking veteran of similar battles in the United States, where he won his spurs as an oilfield regulator with the Texas Railroad Commission. He proved to be a match for the Turner Valley bunch.
“He was one of those rough, tough guys who could deal with the rough, tough crowd at Turner Valley,” Manning recalls in the ERCB’s educational history video.
“When Knode first proposed conservation measures and said he was going to shut down wells, some early producers who were rough, tough guys said there was no way they were going to conform to some board order. He would get in his truck, drive down there, find the guy that owned the (wasteful) well, grab him by the shirt and tell him, ‘We’re going to seal your well – and if you touch those seals, we’re going to put you in jail’.”
Knode’s 21st-century heirs, led by ERCB chairman Dan McFadyen, are smooth diplomats by comparison. They have to be. In the Tomahawk case, opponents of sour-gas drilling formally complained to the appeal court that board personnel behaved incorrectly and exhibited bias just by calling them “objectors.”
But today’s board is also still prepared to be just as firm as its ancestors.
In the Tomahawk case, the ERCB described complaints against drilling as “moving,” but urged the community to focus on facts and question “alarmist” critics. There is “no reason to stop sour development,” the board ruled. The Tomahawk fight continued this fall over additional well applications, effectively serving notice that opponents of sour gas are not about to make the ERCB’s life easier any time soon.
Pages: 1 2
Issue Contents
Entries