Canadian Petroleum History Society remembers oil boom spies and secrecy
Industrial espionage colors a pioneer legacy of frontier exploration
In the black gold rush that followed the 1947 Leduc discovery south of Edmonton, D.H. (Derry) MacFarlane and his peers stopped short of killing for oil. But taking chances on succumbing to exposure or dying in road, snowmobile and airplane accidents went with their turf.
“I was thinking all the time, ‘I’m going to freeze to death,’” MacFarlane recalled as he reminisced about his youth as an industry pioneer at a Calgary meeting of the Canadian Petroleum History Society. He paid plenty of dues while rising to the top of his professional ladder, where he served terms as president of the Canadian Oil Scouts Association and, eventually, the International Oil Scouts Association.
MacFarlane also accepts a blunter word for himself and his occupational peers: spies. Industrial espionage was a fixture of the exploration era. Until the late 1970s, swaths of Alberta – with an area 95 per cent as big as Texas but only 15 per cent of its population – were terra incognita for oil and gas hunters. Fresh gushers were still to be had. Rivalry for prime drilling targets was fierce. Companies watched one another for clues that untried patches of mineral rights – “land,” in industry jargon – were worth bidding on at fortnightly provincial auctions.
Alberta let explorers keep well results secret for two years as “tight holes.” But drilling rigs were too big to hide and exhibited telltale signs of discoveries or failures. Scouts staked out wells, watching the action with telescopes and binoculars. Depths could be deduced, for instance, by counting standard-length pieces of drill pipe that crews hauled up to change bits. Use of some equipment – such as geological core sampling devices or production testing gear like tanks and flare stacks – was a dead giveaway of a discovery.
Nature made the stakeouts dangerous. In the exploration heyday, as now, most drilling waited for winter to freeze northern mud and muskeg swamp hard enough to support heavy machinery – and potentially congeal a spy’s blood.
Espionage was so common that the industry evolved an institution to save on spying time, costs and personal risks. Scouts held weekly meetings called checks to swap status reports on routine wells that only extended or developed known discoveries.
But oil companies kept rights to hold back information on fresh exploration by designating wells as tight or “wildcat” throws of investment dice. The secrets were duly noted as dares to venture out for frigid vigils at remote drilling sites.
MacFarlane had two brushes with hypothermia. Both were lethal reality versions of Jack London’s classic 1902 short story, To Build a Fire, about a Klondike gold prospector who froze to death because a small mistake out in the Yukon cold left his fingers too numb to light a match.
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