Essay

The October 1972 edition of Popular Science magazine asked its readers to solve a rhetorical riddle: “What has 56 Wheels and Flies?” The answer followed: “The World’s Largest Aircraft”. This story introduced Boeing’s Resource Carrier 1, a truly massive flying machine, envisioned with one goal in mind, “to get oil of the Arctic”.

The dimensions and specs of this “behemoth” were enough to leave the reader breathless – a wingspan of almost 500 feet (necessitating those 56 wheels on 8 sets of landing gear) with a length greater than a football field; twelve engines needed to take off and land the bulk of the 985,000 pound aircraft; a carrying capacity of 2.3 million pounds, or 8100 barrels of oil for those counting in this metric, contained in the fuselage and in the two detachable 150x26 foot cargo pods on each flat wing; a US$70 million construction tab (roughly $520 million in 2024 dollars). The RC-1 was given a host of nicknames by proponents that worked to condition expectation and produce affect – the flying pipeline, the brute lifter, and the BUB, or Big Ugly Bird.

Except this “dead-serious drawing-board monster” never left the imaginations of aerospace engineers, bureaucrats, oil executives and other Arctic development dreamers. The Boeing RC-1 was never built, but I suggest in this short essay that it should be seen as a very real symbol of the risks, dreams, and imaginaries that propelled visions of resources economies in Arctic lands and oceans. The ‘discovery’ of oil in Prudhoe Bay in the near offshore off the north slope of Alaska in 1968 kicked of a frenzy of exploration and investment in the North American Arctic, extending to the adjacent Canadian waters of the Beaufort Sea and shortly to the Arctic Archipelago and to Baffin Island and the Eastern Arctic region. The extraordinary sense of potential and possibility was only tempered by a growing understanding of the environmental, climatic, and geophysical obstacles to extraction and transport – ice, rogue waves, permafrost, cold and storms and the effects that all of these things could have on both human bodies and their machines. A nascent Arctic hydrocarbon economy would require a completely new set of technologies, tools and infrastructure. This Arctic energy imaginary would have to invented.

In this sense, the RC-1 is useful as an avatar for thinking about the speculative futures that needed to be imagined and produced to make Arctic extraction possible. The RC-1 was science fiction, one of a whole host of technologies and infrastructures would be required to transcend the difficulties of scale – both economic and geographic – that would make Arctic hydrocarbon economies more pipe dream than reality.

What was the actual plan? What was the project that motivated such colossal leaps of imagination? Northern resources, most likely liquified natural gas, would be transported from a collection/liquefaction point, likely on King Christian Island. Because of their bulk, the RC-1 planes could only travel an estimated 1000 miles while fully loaded, meaning that a southern terminus at an existing location or one constructed anew would be needed. Air infrastructure in Edmonton, Alberta and Cochrane, Ontario was deemed useable for the servicing western and eastern Canadian markets, though a new facility at the northern tip of the Boothia Peninsula was mooted by Boeing and by boosters as the ideal transshipment point in the Arctic. A new pipeline could then travel over land to southern Canadian markets and beyond. A fleet would be needed to create the flying pipeline, with 50 planes in constant motion. Eight flights a day per plane would deliver something in the range of 2 million barrels of oil, a total roughly equivalent to the capacity of the TransAlaska Pipeline, a tricky project that had been approved but delayed in the early 1970s. A simple plan in theory, but one that would have encountered huge difficulties in scale, engineering, geography, financing, and political opposition in practice.

Yet advocates were steadfast in their campaigning, at least through 1972-73 when it looked like the project had momentum. Verne Atrill, economist, futurist, and Chairman of the Great Plains Project think tank, claimed the RC-1 “is one of the boldest development programs ever conceived for Canada or indeed, for the world.” It promised no less than the ability to alleviate the national economy from the shackles of land and geography, or what he called “the rigidities of surface modes of travel.” The RC-1 fleet would transcend the vast northern realm, as gas by air would remove the “distortions [which] are the form and substance of some of our most fundamental problems.” And it wasn’t just gas that would flow south. The very conditions of Arctic environments would be transported by the RC-1, namely “cold”:

“You start off with one resource but you really deliver two. You’re delivering material that is minus 270 degrees Fahrenheit. When that material is regasified, it freezes everything around it which is to say it automatically produces liquid air. You have brought down the basic resource for a refrigeration industry.”

The Great Plains Project was just one example of massive-scale, future-oriented, planning milieu that galvanized these kinds of audacious and hubristic planning proposals in mid-century Canada. Perhaps inspired by the mid-50s northern visions of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s Roads to Resources program or Major-General Richard Rohmer’s many proposals for a mid-Canada corridor, the high modernist visionaries associated with the Regina-based Great Plains Project proposed novel transport solutions to unlock the ‘stranded resources’ of the north. The most ambitious program was the development of “Northport”, a trans-shipment facility for Arctic ore and hydrocarbons to be located on the west coast of Hudson Bay. Raw materials would flow south, likely moved by the growing fleet of RC-1 planes, and collected at a location with deep-sea port capabilities, with the goal of establishing the means to move goods 365-days a year. Churchill, Manitoba was the ideal location, with existing air facilities and rail link, but sediment from the Churchill River confounded plans for the deep sea port. Further north, Chesterfield Inlet was targeted, with the prospect of easy access to the recently discovered ores near Baker Lake, while Repulse Bay on the Melville Peninsula was also recommended.

American engineers and northern development dreamers were not to be outdone. The US Army Core of Engineers developed multiple plans to bring northern waters to the parched US Southwest, most famously the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA) which would bring the fresh water of Alaska and Yukon Territories through the Rocky Mountain Trench to California and beyond. Other groups aimed to solve the northern transportation problem. The US Atomic Energy Commission proposed Project Chariot in the late 1950s at Cape Thompson on the coast Chukchi Sea, just off Alaska’s North Slope. As part of the attempt to develop nuclear processes for peacetime engineering purposes, Chariot involved the controlled detonation of multiple nuclear bombs to excavate a deep-sea port and transportation channel. We have no continent-sized aqueducts and no nuclear ports, but many of these ideas have long shadows in northern development dreams.

Many other smaller scale technological developments needed to be imagined in the quest to produce Arctic oil and gas. These still required the embrace of a science fictional orientation. Getting material out of the ground was the obvious challenge. The creation of artificial islands was one idea that met with success – if the RC-1 was a Brute Lifter, this was the application of brute force. In the shallow waters of the Beaufort Sea, the sea bottom could be dredged “like a rotating egg-beater” and piled into a land base for drill rigs. Ice itself became a construction material as it hardened and held the muck in place. Immerk Island, a 2.5 hectare plot of land at a cost of $9 million, was built in this method in 1972 and 1973. Drillers sunk a drill to 2700m before it was abandoned. Executives thought its failure proved the feasibility of this method.

Getting materials out of the Arctic was a problem of another order of magnitude. The story of the Mackenzie Valley pipeline is best known, but multiple Canadian consortia proposed pipelines from more northern latitudes. Competing visions from the Polar Gas Project and the Arctic Pilot Project saw gas pipelines crisscrossing the permafrost, battling the movements of ice as the hoped from island to island on their way to southern markets. Other visions had nuclear-powered submarines moving oil and gas under the ice, limiting the exposure to Arctic environments but conjuring visions of oil trapped under ice for decades in the event of an accident. Ice breaker tankers were perhaps the most realistic options – the SS Manhattan made several successful trip through the ice in the wake of the Prudhoe Bay discovery, while also kicking off a minor geopolitical incident as it made its way through the Northwest Passage in its effort to prove oil could be moved across Arctic waters year round.

A final body of work involved the finer details of what was possible at the sites of extraction. The need to clean up was at the forefront of this endeavor and it is here that the speculative futures of Arctic oil and gas might have their most direct legacy. Northern oil spill researchers have been industry leaders for several decades, as the methods developed and technologies tested in Arctic waters have been adapted in other marine locations. Multi-year experiments like the Baffin Island Oil Spill Project (1980-83) had profound implications, yielding important containment methods and technological innovations, yet also reinforcing the very conditions of extraction by fixing the ability to clean up an oil spill in time and space. BIOS produced its own logic of repair, by testing the feasibility of dispersants in an “unpeopled” area and by advancing research on the development of bioengineered microbes designed to eat spilled oil, putting nature to work through the process of natural attenuation. More practically, stainless steel booms, air curtain destruction and all manner of “heli-portable” tools (box incinerators, reciprocating kilns, igniters and burners) were deployed to ensure that oil could be cleaned from Arctic waters and the nearshore. “Future research directions” of BIOS scientists would once again reinforce the science fictional mode of inquiry so often brought into focus around Arctic energy imaginaries: the conceptual subsea containment system could be deployed in the event of a blowout on the Arctic ocean floor, with a giant suction cup hoovering oil above the surface, where it would be ignited and flared into the atmosphere.

The RC-1 and these development dreams were all subsumed by the scale that needed to be transcended and fell apart against the extraordinary cost of Arctic extraction. Yet, within each of these proposals is a reminder that these dreams never truly die out – we see versions of these ideas appear with metronomic regularity (see the current hype about airships as northern supply vehicles). On a more fundamental level, these projects are a reminder that everything we now consider to be the normal order of things in extractive economies (pipelines, roads on the permafrost, drills, oil spill cleanup, etc.) likewise requires huge investment and imagination to make possible – we should continue to approach projects for northern development with a healthy dose of skepticism as the science fiction futures of the past become present day reality.