ABSTRACT

The oil and gas hunt in British Columbia has had a colourful, turbulent passage dating back to 1875 when the Dominion Geological Survey’s Selwyn and Dawson noted the hydrocarbon potential in the Peace River area. Oil, tar and gas seeps had been recorded across the province from the Queen Charlotte Islands in the west, to the Fraser Delta in the south, the Kootenay-Flathead valley in the east and to the Peace River valley in the north. Drilling commenced in the 1890s with simple cable-tool rigs. The first commercial natural gas discovery was made in 1922, with a bang! The physical constraints of muskeg and mountains made progress slow and hardship a constant companion to the field parties, seismic crews, drillers and pipeliners. Simple shallow exploration for natural gas steadily evolved to deeper targets of oil, gas and even carbon dioxide, at depths up to 4500 metres. Half a billion barrels and 20 trillion cubic feet of natural gas were found, all in the northeast British Columbia basin. The other interior and offshore basins remain under explored and encouraging. Emerging technologies and new concepts in these historical basins may soon dramatically alter the face of oil and gas production in British Columbia.

INTRODUCTION

Imagine being on a roller coaster ride except... you can’t see where you are going, you lose half your cars when you hit the bottom, the power that runs the ride gets shut off without notice, and the cost of the ride changes with each turn. Welcome to the story of oil and gas in British Columbia!

British Columbia disguises its complex past. Changing sea levels, shifting crust, creation and destruction of volcanic island arcs and interior basins, mountain building, erosion, wide temperature variations and, last but not least, several major glacial periods, have sculpted a geological paradise. This paper discusses events, within this complex Cordilleran setting, that relate to hydrocarbon development, with particular emphasis on the eastern side of British Columbia.

Our interest in energy sources has always been linked to demand. Throughout this paper reference is made to economic conditions which have influenced the geological pursuit of hydrocarbons.

GEOLOGY

The western Canadian sedimentary basin contains all of the present conventional oil and gas reserves of British Columbia. Half a billion years ago the western coastline of North America was near the present Alberta - British Columbia border. To the east the Canadian Shield remained the core of the continent, eroding and shedding mature sands into Saskatchewan and Alberta. To the west lay British Columbia and the deep blue sea, interrupted by occasional islands and rafted chunks of oceanic crust. From the Devonian time of about 400 million years to the Cretaceous of 65 million years ago this part of British Columbia experienced three broad changes that would shape the present distribution of oil and gas deposits.

Imagine snorkeling in the Caribbean. Now try it in Fort Nelson. It would have seemed very similar in the Devonian and Missippian periods when British Columbia was submerged under a warm and gentle sea. Broad, thick platforms with occasional reefs near basin edges and interior seaways, were built of limestone and dolomite. Many of these porous buildups would later contain the giant gas fields of northern British Columbia.

Now imagine sitting on a beach in the Persian Gulf. It is just like hot, dry Fort St. John, in the Triassic of course. The arid tropical conditions created extensive dune fields spilling out into evaporitic salt flats and deep estuaries. Shorelines in the shallow, warm sea were flooded and exposed repeatedly, forming broad layers of sandstone, carbonate and evaporitic rocks. Algal mats flourished, building layered porous stromatolites that would later contain British Columbia’s largest oil field at Boundary Lake.

Now imagine the Fraser River. You have come up through time to the Cretaceous, to a place with a cool and moist climate, coaly swamps and deep erosion. Abundant rainfall carries a wide range of sediments from the uplifting mountains of the west to a seaway linking the Gulf of Mexico in the south and the Arctic sea in the north. The river and shorelines developed clastic reservoirs which were to be deeply buried and charged with gas from adjacent coal seams. The giant Deep Basin gas fields were created.

British Columbia became higher and drier; mountain building and glacial erosion had almost completely disguised the deeply buried past. Seeps from fractured reservoirs and shallow swamp gas gave the first clues to the potential for hydrocarbons and the search began.

EARLY HISTORY

Surface occurrences of hydrocarbons have been used throughout recorded time. Bitumen pits were used as mortar in the Tower of Babel and King Solomon’s temple.Three thousand years ago the Chinese drilled as deep as 600 metres and piped natural gas through bamboo for flares to evaporate salt from brine. The Greeks vanquished an enemy fleet by covering the seas with oil and igniting it. The Persian Gulf recently offered a disturbing repeat of that event. The eternal flame at the shrine of the Oracle of Delphi is a natural gas seep. Burma was digging wells by the 16 century and by the 18th century was producing 45 million litres of oil per year. In the 1700s George Washington’s property values were actually enhanced by an oil seep!

A 1917 description by the Imperial Oil Company pictured gasoline as, a clear nervous liquid which is composed of speed, noise and trouble in equal parts. It is made of kerosene reduced to a more violent stage and supplied to the restless portion of mankind. These words also summarize the passage of petroleum exploration through history.

THE CANADIAN PICTURE

In 1788 the Canadian explorer Peter Pond recorded that Cree along the Athabasca River used tar to caulk their canoes. But it wasn’t until the 1800s that our society began to see oil as anything other than soap-box medicine or a natural curiosity.

The industrial age was limited by poor light, lubricants and power sources. Man had depended on whale, fish and vegetable oils to provide smoky, stinking lamps and rancid lubrication for increasingly important machines. In 1850 a little known Canadian doctor, self-taught chemist and geologist in Nova Scotia, Dr. Abraham Gesner, was the first to distill kerosene from asphalt and coal. Its bright, clean odourless flame quickly lit the public’s interest and replaced whale oil in lamps. Within ten years there were seventy plants manufacturing kerosene from coal, and eventually oil, in the United States. Until the mid-1850s the primary source of oil had been natural springs and seeps.

In 1850 a chemist with Canada’s Dominion Geological Survey determined that tar from seeps in Ontario could be used to build roads, seal boats and make gas for lighting. In 1854 the Tripp brothers of Enniskillen, Ontario created a company to develop these tar pits; the company 1 000 was registered to produce oils, paints, burning fluids, varnishes and other products.Lack of roads and markets made distribution difficult. Every heavy rain turned the area into a swamp and the gummy beds made drainage slow. Eventually poor fortune forced them to sell the holdings to James Miller Williams. In 1857 Williams built a small refinery. Stagnant, algae-ridden surface water lay almost everywhere on the mucky beds and Williams decided to drill for fresh water. The well hit oil at 20 metres and became North Americas’ first oil well. Production sold in Hamilton for 16 cents a gallon (about 4 cents per litre), up to 100 000 gallons (378 500 litres) at a time. Williams was the world’s first integrated oil company, exploring, producing, refining and marketing oil as the Canadian Oil Company.

In 1859 Colonel Drakes’ well was drilled in Pennsylvania, with massive publicity, which got the Americans into the game and started a boom in growth.By 1863 there were 30 refineries in Ontario but the roller coaster of oil prices began to loom. From $6 a barrel in 1861, it slid to $4 in 1864. Demand boosted prices to $11 in 1865 and new production facilities and the start of huge cartels and monopolies in the United States caused the price to drop to 50 cents in 1867.Some things never change. American producers flooded the markets and kept Canadian producers in Canada.

By 1898 the introduction of the automobile forced the refineries to produce gasoline from kerosene; previously this was considered an unpleasant byproduct of little value. Gasoline was to become the premier force of the industrial revolution for the next 100 years, sending explorers into remote regions of British Columbia in pursuit of this clear, nervous liquid.

BRITISH COLUMBIA STARTS THE
GREAT WESTERN BLACK-GOLD RUSH

Ontario’s greasy fields around Petrolia must have seemed the centre of Canadian petroleum civilization; the Canadian west was but a remote, little understood collection of regions called the Northwest Territories. In 1870 a Geological Survey report noted oil and gas seeps southwest of Calgary.Then in 1875 Alfred Selwyn, the Director General of the Dominion Geological Survey, led the first geological expedition into British Columbia’s Peace River country. He mapped surface outcrops and measured the faults and topography of the foothills. His expedition geologist, George Dawson, described the potential of oil and gas in the area; the information remained buried for several years.

Seeps on the British Columbia - Alberta border in the southeast Flathead Valley (Figure 29) were described in 1874 by the pioneer homesteader John George Kootenai Brown to George Dawson. Kootenai Brown would dip gunny sacks into the seeps at Oil Creekand squeeze the oil into containers to be sold for lamp fuel to nearby ranchers. Farther east in Alberta, the CPR was drilling for water for their steam engines and stumbled upon the huge gas fields of Medicine Hat. The recognition of large amounts of oil and gas in western Canada was gaining speed.
 

British Columbia always remained an importer of oil, usually in large wooden barrels from the Standard Oil refinery in Ohio. In the 1890s Imperial Oil had set up a terminal in Vancouver to ship in oil. Union Oil then set up a large tank at Coal Harbour as the sea-going and coastal vessels converted from coal to oil. British Columbia saw its first automobile in 1898, a Stanley Steamer owned by William Henry Armstrong of Vancouver, and the restless portion of mankind was off again.

 The southeast part of our province remained actively explored with 40 wells drilled since the 1880s. Another geological survey described additional oil seeps in 1891, with most of the land being leased by 1900. A French text written for the Ministry of Commerce and Industry of France, and translated into English in 1901, describes the oil as coming from siliceous sandstone, rich in magnesian limestone and which would appear to belong to the Upper Cambrian formation. This international reference noted the complex relationship of older rocks over younger. The study of this overthrusting would continue even to the present and led to many later finds throughout the foothills in Canada and the United States.The British Columbia Ministry of Mines report of 1904 adds that the seepage is trifling at present, but that the great mass of conformably bedded deposit was in place and suitable for the retention of oil produced in quantity.

 One of the shows on the Alberta side was drilled and had a rate sworn in an affidavit at 300 barrels of oil per day. The first documented British Columbia well, Akamina #1, was drilled in 1909 to 383 metres (1256 feet), with oil shows at 182 metres (598 feet) and 381 metres (1251 feet). In the prospectus used to raise money to drill this well the promoters quote passages from a classic 1906 study by Sir Boverton Redwood, advisor on world wide petroleum resources to the British Admiralty; Petroleum occurs in south east Kootenay, near Waterton lake; the product varies from a perfectly liquid pale yellow to an opaque blackish brown oil. Gas exudes with the oil from the joints in the rock and ignites readily on application of a light. The Kootenay was gaining worldwide notoriety. Several attempts were made to drill for the expected massive oil field, with wells flowing up to 20 barrels of oil per day, but no commercial wells remain. Wells were all drilled by cable tool which literally dropped a heavy chisel bit on the end of a cable, chipping a hole down through the layers of tight bedrock to the porous reservoir below. The method was dangerous and slow but information on producible zones was visible in the rock chips scooped up to the surface.

 By 1908 there were 268 cars in British Columbia, and nearly 6000 by 1914. The first gas station in Canada was opened by Imperial Oil in Vancouver in 1907.By 1936 there were over 2000 outlets in the province producing an enormous demand for refined oil and gasoline. A refinery had been built at Port Moody, and another across the inlet in 1914. It was still cheaper to bring in crude oil from California and Peru than move the Ontario oil to British Columbia.

Fraser Valley exploration for both natural gas fields and potential storage reservoirs has recently spawned a public controversy but the area has had a long history of drilling, speculation, promoters and tantalizing leads. Over the last few millions of years 5 kilometeres of sediments have built up in the Fraser Delta providing many potential productive horizons. In the 1880s the Canadian Pacific Railroad was drilling for coal and had some gas shows near Haney. In 1904 a natural gas well near the mouth of the Fraser River at Steveston was used to light the streets for several years. Drilling occurred over a wide area and up the valley as far as Chilliwack. A hospital in Delta used local natural gas for about six years. Another well was used by a farmer for cooking and heating from 1936 to 1950 but so far no commercial quantities have been found. Geological analysis of the rocks suggest the area should be suitable for clean natural gas but not for oil.Northwest of Bellingham, Washington, gas in sufficient quantity for local domestic use has been obtained from glacial sediments at depths of about 50 metres; this is probably marsh gas from organic decay of swampy materials. Only a handful of deep wells have been drilled in recent history, none commercial. Each new well, instead of extinguishing the exploration interest with its abundant fresh water, lit new fires by calibrating seismic data, identifying reservoir sandstones and providing pressure data, geochemical analysis and depositional history that would help create the next concept.

The earliest studies of the offshore basins were conducted by Geological Survey of Canada scientists, primarily in the Queen Charlotte Islands. James Richardson in 1872 and 1873, and George Dawson in 1878 and 1880 studied the geology, biology and anthropology of the area.
Oil and tar seeps on northern Graham Island were a constant source of interest through the early 1900s. Between 1911 and 1915 drilling was conducted near northwest Graham Island. An early oil-shale pilot plant reported that the black tarry shales could yield about 20 gallons per ton. That’s like heating and squeezing a chunk of rock about the size of a refrigerator to collect 100 litres of low-quality oil. Intriguing, but no large plant was built.

THE NEXT BIG LOOP ON THE ROLLER COASTER:
TURNER VALLEY

The turning point of Canada’s exploration effort came with the discovery in 1914 of the giant gas and oil field at Turner Valley Alberta. The raw-oil produced was so pure it could be pumped directly from the well into cars as gasoline. So great was the excitement that in one 24-hour period more than 500 oil companies were formed and selling shares to cash in on the frenzy. The role of the risk taker has always been a key part in the high stakes game of exploration. In this case most never drilled a well, let alone saw any oil and huge fortunes were won and lost.

Exploration pushed up along the foothills to the northwest, eventually into the Peace River area of British Columbia. In 1917 McLearn, another Geological Survey geologist wrote that oil and gas may be found in commercial quantities in some of the strata of the Cretaceous. Geological reconnaissance work by Gwillim, Dressler and Speiker confirmed these opinions and led to the drilling of five shallow holes in the Hudson Hope area near the present Bennett dam site. The information had to be wrestled from the rigours of bitter cold, -40 C weather, deep mucky roads, lack of supplies, money and support, and primitive equipment. The wells were abandoned but did provide enough natural gas to keep the drilling camp in warmth and hot food.

An Imperial Oil discovery at Peace River in 1922 is considered British Columbia’s first commercial gas discovery, with rates reported up to 12 million cubic feet (339 600 cubic metres) per day. Blow-out prevention equipment was neither available nor mandatory in those days. A small gas line was rigged up to supply the cookhouse stove, boiler and bunkhouse. A major leak and explosion on Christmas Day 1922 blew the camp down, destroyed all buildings and supplies. Although no lives were lost, a bitter cold sleigh trip to Pouce Coupe was needed to treat the burnt crew.

The provincial government of that time felt the potential resources of northeast British Columbia should only be developed by the government and froze all activity for the next 25 years. The last well drilled by the government in northeast British Columbia was Pine River #1 between 1940 and 1942. It was a difficult well from start to finish; the final line in the well report ends as well abandoned due to political influence! Elsewhere technology was making huge strides. Diamond bits made drilling faster and cheaper, cores could be cut providing a better geological picture of the reservoirs, rotary drilling reduced costs and improved safety, nitroglycerine could fracture and stimulate producing zones, hydrogen sulphide was removed to produce safe, usable natural gas and bush planes made the remote wilderness more accessible, all by the mid 1920s. Minor exploration continued in other British Columbia basins for the next two decades but not much happened until 1947.

LEDUC REVIVES THE INDUSTRY

Petroleum consumption, particularly gasoline, had soared. Canada’s largest company, Imperial Oil, drilled 133 dry holes and had almost given up on finding more oil. The remark often repeated through history was uttered; all the big finds were gone. Imperial was experimenting with producing gasoline from natural gas. An expensive, complex process which produced a low quality gasoline but it was thought it may be the only way to stay in the gasoline business. This was in mind in 1947 for the location at Leduc #1 southwest of Edmonton, Imperial’s last wildcat drilling program. Nearby were large natural gas fields where Imperial was thinking of a gasoline synthesis project. As many discoveries have shown, serendipity and luck saved the day; the zone was not expected to have oil. Leduc was the largest discovery in 33 years, triggering a boom that would eventually find the bulk of Canada’s oil reserves hidden in the deep limestone and dolomite reefs of the Devonian.

At the same time that the lands in British Columbia were opened up to private companies, the Alaska Highway was built allowing access to new areas and more efficient rotary drilling rigs were in use. A major discovery of natural gas was made near Fort St. John in 1948. By 1951 drilling had discovered five new gas fields out of 31 attempts. The Trans-Mountain pipeline was built in 1953 to carry Alberta oil to the coast and refinery capacity doubled. The Westcoast natural gas pipeline was built in 1957. The first British Columbia oil field was found in 1958, the giant Boundary Lake field straddling the border with Alberta. Construction of major refineries at Taylor, near Fort St. John, and Prince George commenced in 1959.Major new discoveries continued with many new oil and gas fields from Fort St. John to Fort Nelson.

Access to the challenging terrain was often limited by weather. The soft muskeg had to be frozen to move equipment, so field seasons were often only two or three months long.River ice bridges had to be made, seismic shot and pipelines laid, all in bitter cold and remote regions. But the big discoveries were being made, from the narrow and long fields riding high on Mississippian faults along the front ranges of the foothills near Chetwynd, to the deep Devonian reefs at Fort Nelson, multilayered and chopped up Triassic oil fields near Fort St. John and gas-filled ancient Cretaceous coastal deposits south of Dawson Creek in the Deep Basin. Half a billion barrels of oil were found and about 20 trillion cubic feet (566 billion cubic metres) of gas, enough gas to supply all of Canada’s needs for 10 years. Northeast British Columbia remains the busiest part of the province but other areas are still of interest.

Extensive marine geophysical survey programs were run in offshore British Columbia encouraging Shell to build the world’s largest drilling rig in Victoria (Figure 30).Fourteen wells were drilled offshore from 1967 to 1969, with encouraging oil and gas shows but no commercial discoveries. The Queen Charlotte and Tofino basins cover an area about the size of the North Sea, which had 50 dry holes drilled prior to an economic discovery. The entire coast and offshore of British Columbia has had only 13 wells drilled to depths greater than 1000 metres. The small Winona basin at the north end of Vancouver Island has not had a single test.Our Pacific offshore is considered the last great frontier for exploration. It has been closed to drilling by a federal/provincial moratorium since 1972.Until environmental considerations and public concerns are fully satisfied it will likely remain off limits to drilling.
 

Vancouver Island has had several shallow wells drilled, from an old well at Muir Creek near Sooke, through one near Saturna, to the coal fields in the north. In 1986, British Petroleum drilled two wells south of Nanaimo to depths of 1.4 and 1.6 kilometres. All were unsuccessful. With the building of the new Vancouver Island pipeline and the interest in methane gas from coal, we may again see geologists on the island exploring for natural gas.

The Flathead Valley has seen occasional revivals as new seismic techniques were used to decipher the complex thrusting and faulting of the rocks, and markets justified the expensive, deep drilling required. Kootenai Brown’s oil and gas shows continue to draw attention and now, deep gas, coal-bed gas and carbon dioxide have joined the quest.

The interior basins of Bowser, Nechako, Quesnel and Whitehorse remain remote and little explored. Oil and gas shows have been reported near Quesnel, Horsefly, Hazelton and Burns Lake. Theyare in complex faulted terrain that would suggest the rocks are overmature and reservoirs are poorly sealed.

Work is currently underway by the Geological Survey of Canada and private companies to expand the understanding of these basins. Two wells drilled several years ago in the Nechako basin resulted in minor shows but have not been pursued.

CONCLUSIONS

New technologies may make entire new sources of petroleum available; new drilling and recovery methods, heavy oils, oil shales and methane from coal could double British Columbia’s present reserves. The offshore may yet be carefully evaluated and contribute to our energy picture.

The intimate role of energy in our society has generated the need to locate and produce hydrocarbons. Within a short hundred-year history, from Kootenai Brown squeezing gunny sacks to today, Canadians have become the world’s largest per capita users of energy. We have nearly a million kilometres of roads paved with asphalt, a cold climate, lots of vehicles and a high standard of living that demands energy-intensive air travel, primary resource production, intensive agriculture and basic creature comforts. The nature of the oil and gas search into the future will be dictated by the markets, economics and lifestyle standards which we set, just like the Chinese thousands of years ago, for ourselves and our children.

From a quotation in the Story of Oil in British Columbia, written in 1930 by the Akamina Valley Oil Company,...From geological information the oil bearing rocks are as thick in British Columbia, if not thicker, than in any other section of the world. This means that the pay formations that will produce the oil should have a longer life because of this greater depth than in other petroliferous areas. Sixty years ago Akamina may have been ahead of its time. Although its geologists possibly should have referred to natural gas, they were correct, in that great opportunities still exist in the province, born by the courageous, creative restless part of mankind who made the colourful oil and gas story of British Columbia.