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© 1975 Nature Publishing Group

518 

THE belief that Canada is .rich in nat-
ural resources is generally accepted by 
Canadians as well as others, and is cer-
tainly widely held by their neighbours 
south of the border. I<t is, in fact, one 
basis of <the USA's wish for joint con-
trol of North American resources. 

It ·is thus interesting .to hear from a 
professor of geology at Carleton Uni-
versity, F. Kenneth North, that this 
idea is largely illusory. "Canada," Dr 
North told a ·recent Conference on 
Technology and Canadian Foreign Re-
lations at this university in Ottawa, "is 
the only energy-deficient nation in the 
world which believes itself to be energy-
abundant and behaves accordingly." 

Dr North has a habit of making flat, 
uncompromising statements, and he 
has been making quite a few of them 
regarding Canada's energy supplies in 
recent months. The kind of thing he 
told ·the Carleton conference was just 
what he has been telling federal 
authorities, although there is not much 
evidence· that they have been listening. 

Pe·rhaps this as because they do not 
want to believe him. His message is 
that energy supplies-particula·rly oil-
have been vastly overestimated and 
that, regardless of what action is taken, 
Canada faces a severe energy crisis 
before the end of the 1970s. 

"No matter how carefully we estab-
l.ish our priorities, no matter how 
expeditiously that conversion to other 
energy forms can be brought about, 
no matter how successful our conserva-
tion measures may become, social and 
economic disruptions on a vast scale 
are inev·itable", he says. 'The United 
States will be a much .Jess affluent and 
comfortable place than it has been . 
Canadians should be wondering 
whether large parts of t·hei·r country 
might not have to be evacuated." 

That is pre·tty strong stuff, and the 
recourse of some who hea•r it is simply 
to recoil into their natural optimism . 
Phi·lip H. Tresize, another delegate to 
the Carle•ton conference (organised by 
the Norman Paterson School of Inte·r-
national Affairs), did just that. Now 
a senior fellow at the Brookings Insti-
tute and a former US ambassador to 
the OECD, Mr Tresize replied: "I am 
not impressed with the idea we're run-
ning out of resources .. . I can't chal-
lenge Dr North, but the world is made 
uo of little else than raw materials, 
and our history has been that we've 
consistently found new resources. and 
I have no reason to believe this will not 
continue to the end of time ." 

Dr Nort·h had more facts than that at 
his disoosal. Canada has always been 
regarded bv her American neighbours 
as "some kind of resource cornucopia." 
he said. "But Canada is not remarkably 
rich in primary •resources in proportion 
to Hs size. The number of really large 
mines .jn Canada can be counted on the 

Is Canada an energy-
deficient nation ? 

from David Spurgeon, Ollawa 

fingers of one hand, and we have no 
very large oil or gas fields. There are 
individual copper mines in Chile and 
Africa capable of producing more new 
copper than all Canadian mines put 
together. Many of the richest gold and 
silver camps are Jn the western Cordil-
lera of the Ameri·cas. 

"Though we have 7% of ·the Earth's 
land area, and more than 7 % of its 
area of continental crust, we have less 
than 2 % of .its conventional oi·l," said 
Dr North . "Even our vast reservoks of 
~resh water are easily misrepresented. 
Far too much of it lies on the surface 
jn easi.Jy polluted lakes; for a land of 
Canada's size, we are short of good 
subsurface aquifers because so much of 
our teHitory is either Precambrian 
shield or ·impermeable igneous rock. 

"Canada owes her outstanding 
mineral production to her geographic 
and economic relationship to the 
United States. We have allowed them 
to establish our country as their re-
source hinterland. Canada's gross 
mineml production constitutes 7% of 
our gross national product. Ninety per 
cent of it is exported . Of aH Canadian 
exports, of all materials to all trading 
pa.rtners, nearly one-sixth is of minerals 
and fossil fuels to the United States." 

Canada's total known remaining oil 
reserves represent less than 15 months 
of present North American consump-
tion, Dr North said. The proven tar 
sands reserves represent for North 
America an extension of four years in 
the life of its reserves-not hundreds 
as many imagine. Canada's total known 
natural gas reserves, including those j.n 
t·he Arctic, which may never be made 
avai•lable , consti•tute a supply of about 
30 months at present North American 
rates of consumption. And the reserves 
of gas so far known in the Mackenzie 
Delta, after nine years of drilling, 
would keep the proposed 48-inch pipe-
line filled for 4f years. 

North's pessimism extends beyond 
Canada, howeve·r. Outside the Com-
munist world, the rate of finding oil 
has shown a perceptible decli·ne since 
1963, he says, and outside the Persian 
Gulf, the heyday of which is now past, 
the 'free-world' has found only four 
basins having recoverable reserves of 
oil large enough to satisfy a single 
year's global demand . 

The only new basins capable of 
yielding prolifically are in remote or 
umeliable regions, chiefly offshore, and 
statistical probabili-ty studies show that 
the Earth's crust is "very unlikely to 
possess more than a handful of pro-
lific basins still to be discovered. Even 

Nature Vol. 255 June 12 1975 

if each of these is presumed to be as 
rich as the Alberta basin, or the North 
Sea, we are look.ing at a quantity of 
new oi·l, from new regions, very much 
smaller than !!he quantity we have al-
ready produced and consumed." 

This leads Dr North to predict that 
the level of world oH production will 
start •to decline in about 1985, not 
halfway through the 21st century, as 
many authorities maintain . 

Similarly, he says it is statistically 
unlikely that North America can pos-
sess more than one or two potentially 
proiific basins •that are still undiscov-
ered . Canada's rate of production must 
start to decline in a year or less, be-
cause reserves have already been de-
clining for five years and the rate of 
addition to reserves has be·en declining 
for 10 years. 

"Starting next year, our capa'ci.ty to 
provide domestic oil will decline at an 
average rate of 110,000 barrels a day 
per year. Unless all demand growth 
can be curbed, therefore, even a new 
ta-r-sand plant eve·ry year would be 
incapable of maintaining Canadian self-
sufficiency in oil. By 1981, our deficit 
will reach 1 million baorrels a day . .. It 
is unLikely-almost inconceivable, in 
fact-that tar-sand production will 
reach even half that amount by then." 

Such doom-saying did not impress 
Mr Tresize. If we run out of one re-
source, he said, human experience 
teaches us that we can have confidence 
we will find substitutes that will do just 
as well. o 

A hundred years ago 
DR FoREL, of Lausanne. has for several 
years been investigating what are 
known as the Seiches of the Lake of 
Geneva . Seich e is applied locally to 
certain oscillatory movements which 
are occasionally seen to occur on the 
surface of the lake . The phenomenon 
had been investigated by previous 
observers, among others by Saussure 
and Vaucher, who attributed the pheno-
menon to variations in atmospheric 
pressure ; in this. Fore!, who has most 
minutely investigated the phenomenon. 
a grees with them. The phenomenon is 
found to occur on other Swiss lakes. 
and Fore! believes it will be found in 
all large bodies of wa ter. Indeed. he 
re :ognises in the Seiche probabl y the 
most considerable and the grandest 
oscillatory movement which can be 
studied on the surfa ce of the globe. 

f rom Nature, 12, 134; June 17, 1875 


	Is Canada an energy deficient nation ?