Fossil Fuel Future?
It would be tough to find a roughneck anywhere in the world who would describe working on a drill rig as easy, but Bob Gamble, who toils on the deck of Precision Drilling’s rig number 521, comes closest.
It is a state-of-the-art rig that bored its first hole just weeks before, an “iron roughneck” that has taken a lot of the backbreaking labour out of a job that has traditionally been recognized as tougher than anything outside a hardrock underground mine.
ยป Source: canada.com
If you venture to northeastern B.C., you will find dozens of similar rigs probing the landscape like mosquitoes seeking blood, guided by young workers such as Gamble who trade their labour for paycheques that can reach $100,000 a year.
The machines and the workers are the physical manifestations of the biggest natural gas exploration boom in B.C.’s history, part of a global scramble for energy resources that has captured the world’s attention like never before.
In the past five years, gas and crude oil prices have tripled, and catastrophists are widely proclaiming that the world’s oil era is drawing to close.
More restrained observers, such as the governments of Canada and the United States, expect North America to run out of conventional natural gas by the middle of the next decade or sooner, sparking interest in higher-priced alternatives.
Terrorist threats in the Middle East, the wars in Central Asia, the global population boom and China’s emergence as the world’s second-largest consumer of oil after the U.S. have pushed consumer prices for gasoline to unprecedented levels. There is no expectation of a return to the cheap fuel and lavish consumption of the 1990s.
An international agency charged with managing developed nations’ access to oil supplies finds itself increasingly focused on alternative energy and conservation efforts — although no clear alternative to oil has yet emerged.
Amid the turmoil there is a deepening anxiety about the cumulative impact that a century’s worth of high-intensity fossil fuel combustion — the consumption of oil, natural gas and coal for energy — is having on the Earth’s climate.
Meanwhile, across Canada, the National Energy Board is anticipating the biggest surge of energy-related development in a decade, with multi-billion-dollar projects for natural gas, oil, and electricity generation development prominent in the minds of many provincial governments.
It is, in essence, a time of both great risk and great opportunity.
In B.C., unlike many other parts of the world, energy-related opportunities prevail.
B.C.’s fossil fuel resources are, as yet, largely untapped — Alberta’s thriving oilsands projects have obscured the fact that production of conventional natural gas is past its peak in that province and is now in a permanent state of decline.
Meanwhile, gas exploration companies will invest an estimated $4.5 billion in 2006 in development of new resources in B.C. — and the province expects a further $2 billion in gas lease and royalty revenues.
One of the hottest gas plays in B.C. is at Cutbank Ridge, a deep, vast field of energy south and east of Dawson Creek.
