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INUVIK, N.W.T. — Seismic lines etched into the permafrost from decades-old exploration are still visible in the 137 kilometres separating the Town of Inuvik and the Hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk on the Arctic Coast.
About 50 kilometres north of Inuvik, the remnants of industrial prospecting mark the location of the Parsons Lake gas field, discovered in the 1970s and one of three proposed to anchor the moribund Mackenzie Valley pipeline. Today, they are an uneasy reminder of the ecologically fragile terrain northern infrastructure must traverse.
“When you put marks in the tundra, it never really goes away,” says Mike Parkes, 32, a helicopter pilot, pointing the throttle on his AS-350-B2 machine north along the Arctic peninsula.
It is a lesson that informs an ambitious road-building project under way on the edge of the Beaufort Sea. Work is set to begin this winter building a highway between Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk, in a throwback to former Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s much-vaunted — but ultimately unrealized — 1950s “road to resources” campaign to connect the Western Arctic and Canada’s southern provinces.
Its revival offers a close look at the daunting challenges behind the federal government’s modern-day plan to develop the North. Ottawa is shouldering the brunt of the project’s roughly $300-million price tag, pledging $200-million at a time of budgetary cutbacks. The Northwest Territories has sunk more than $22-million into front-end engineering and road upgrades so far, part of a $99-million commitment.
The investment is a small step toward closing a mammoth infrastructure gap in Canada’s North, a chasm so wide it renders life in the Arctic — from simple tasks such as buying groceries to the complex feats of engineering needed to tap undersea deposits of crude oil — more expensive than just about anywhere on the planet.
The N.W.T. is eager to upgrade basic infrastructure such as roads and ports as it prepares to take control of mineral resources, oil and natural gas from the federal government next year. Forging an all-weather link with southern Canada could shave hundreds of millions of dollars from exploration and development costs over the 45-year operating life of the Mackenzie Gas Project, Yellowknife has estimated.
But much about highway, and whether it will spark an economic windfall, is open to debate. The technical challenges of building linear infrastructure across a vast expanse of permafrost are immense. How the finished road behaves in a warming climate is a mystery, engineers say, and the oil industry’s appetite for Arctic crude is far from assured, as investment shifts from frontier regions to the boom in shale oil and gas under way in pockets of the United States.
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