We Gambled Everything: The Life and Times of an Oilman by Arne Nielsen. Foreword by Peter C. Newman (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: We Gambled Everything: The Life and Times of an Oilman by Arne Nielsen. Foreword by Peter C. Newman Allan Edward Ingelson We Gambled Everything: The Life and Times of an Oilman. By Arne Nielsen. Foreword by Peter C. Newman. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2012. xxi + 273 pp. Photographs, illustrations, maps, index. C$29.95 paper. The author, a prominent retired Canadian oil geologist and senior industry executive, captures in his memoirs the excitement of oil discoveries on the Alberta and Saskatchewan plains during the 1940s and ’50s. He shares his experiences as a corporate executive for Mobil Oil in New York, while overseeing exploration programs on the plains in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Montana, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and Kansas. Nielsen reviews his childhood and teenage years growing up on the family farm during the 1920s and ’30s in an area subject to drought, dust storms, and poverty on the Alberta plains. After noting there were numerous unsuccessful attempts at drilling for oil on the plains near Leduc, Alberta, and the contribution of improved seismic technology, Nielsen describes the significant commercial oil discovery by Imperial Oil in 1947, that laid the foundation for a Canadian oil and gas industry. Through the eyes of a young geology graduate in the late 1940s he alludes to the increased employment opportunities in the emerging Alberta oil industry for individuals with a strong work ethic. Nielsen notes the significant contribution of US companies—in terms of investment and the deployment of technology on the plains—to the development of the oil and gas industry in western Canada. Through the eyes of a 28-year-old geologist who was a member of the exploration team that discovered an immense oilfield, he shares the excitement of locating the multibillion barrel Pembina oilfield in 1953, that has become one of the most productive fields in North America. In light of his role in the major oil discovery Nielsen was fast tracked to the Socony (Standard Oil of New York) corporate headquarters. Nielsen discusses his oil exploration experience on the plains in Saskatchewan and further south in the Williston Basin in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana. When analyzing the investment climate for oil exploration in Saskatchewan during the 1950s and ’60s, he notes that notwithstanding the stark political contrast to entrepreneurial free-market Alberta, overall the socialist Saskatchewan provincial government was fairly positive toward oil development. The government was aware of the significant economic benefits that neighboring Alberta had accrued from its conventional oil exploration and production activities on the plains. In the balance of the book Nielsen analyzes the changes in Canadian federal energy policies that have dramatically affected the level of oil and gas investment, exploration, and development in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin, eastern Canada offshore, and in the Northwest Territories. A key theme in We Gambled Everything is that US and Canadian oil companies assume substantial uncertainty in their search for commercial accumulations of fossil fuels. The high risk search that Nielsen describes in his book that was present in previous decades continues. Recently American and Canadian oil and gas developers have employed innovative horizontal drilling and fracking techniques to locate and evaluate unconventional energy resources on the plains that were previously uneconomic to produce on a significant scale, such as oil from the Bakken shales in North Dakota and Saskatchewan, in an attempt to satisfy the growing demand for fossil fuels in North America. Allan Edward Ingelson Canadian Institute of Resources Law, Faculty of Law University of Calgary, Alberta Copyright © 2014 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln