The Making of an “All-Alaska” Pipeline

In 1972, Canadaian officials tried in vain to persuade oil executives and American officials to consider a pipeline route through Canada for oil recently discovered in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. The Canadian government invested in costly environmental studies, began construction of a road along the proposed pipeline corridor, and offered to expedite building permits. For oil companies, selling Alaskan crude to Japan would have proved more profitable than transporting and refining it for sale on the US’s east coast. But corporations and the Department of the Interior both rejected transnational routes and markets for Alaskan oil out of hand, in spite of their potential economic benefits.

This paper examines the debates surrounding the “Canadian Alternative” route for Alaskan oil in order to show how questions of governance, labor, security, and nationalism led policy makers and oil companies to arrive at an “all-Alaska” pipeline route from the North Slope to the contiguous states. Using government records, correspondence, and congressional hearings that document exchanges between Canada and the US leading up to approval of the Trans Alaska Pipeline, I trace how government officials and oil industry representatives repeatedly, prematurely dispensed with the possibility of a pipeline corridor through Canada’s Mackenzie Valley in spite of evidence it held a number of environmental and economic benefits. I argue that a nationalist imperative urging energy independence was so crucial to overcoming domestic opposition to the pipeline that it foreclosed any possibility of a transnational route and set limits on economic logic. Recently, Keystone XL has become a charged, but often reductive, symbol of the conflict between environmentalism and capitalism. Considering how the 800-mile long Trans Alaska Pipeline might have taken a different course in the 1970s reminds us that a wider range of factors are at play in determining if and where pipelines are built.