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Consett Head, Melville Island

5:40 p.m., CDT

As they entered the main building of the Polar Gas Study base camp, Magnusson said, “I know there’s a lot riding on the test tomorrow. I hope we don’t let you down, Mr. President.”

Ten members of the staff had gathered in the reception room. After appropriate introductions and a few minutes’ conversation, Magnusson said, “Mr. President, I wonder if I might drag you away from these people and show you the model of our system? I’ve ordered a real Texas steak for you — rare. It should be ready in about fifteen minutes.”

“That sounds fine.” The President nodded, thanked the group, and accompanied Magnusson down a long hall into a briefing room complete with a blackboard, motion picture and slide projectors. At the front of the room were scale models of the experimental under-water under-ice pipeline crossing. Magnusson said, “Sir, if you’d like to sit on that stool, I’ll explain the set-up to you.”

The President dutifully perched on the stool next to the models and said, “Harold, what I really need before you start is a large bourbon and soda. It’s long past that time of day. I’ve got to have something to keep the old pump going.”

Magnusson ordered two bourbon-and-sodas from the canteen bar and then began.

“Please ask me any questions that come to your mind, Mr. President.”

“Sure will.”

“The first model is really a vertical view to scale of the crossing that we have to make.

“The line goes from a pumping station here at Consett Head, east across the Byam channel twelve miles to a landfall at May Cove on the west coast of Byam Martin Island. In fact, we’ve laid two sets of pipe in the water. I’ll explain why in a minute. If we’re successful, we will put together a system that can pick up all the gas on Melville Island and take it straight across to Resolute on Cornwallis. Then the plan is to hook up with a route to the south. We can go from Resolute across to Devon Island to the east, then across the Northwest Passage to Baffin Island, and then down into Northern Quebec and into New York State. The alternative is from Resolute south across the Northwest Passage to Somerset Island, down the Boothia Peninsula and the west coast of Hudson Bay through Ontario to New York State.

“The reason we started off with our experiment between Melville and Byam Martin is that Melville has a bigger volume of gas than any other island in the Canadian Arctic.”

The President said, “Yes, I understand that. I also understand that from 1975 until you came on the scene, several attempts were made to put a metal pipe under the ice, and those experiments were total disasters.”

“Yes, sir, that’s true. What we have had to do is find a system to put a pipe or a series of pipes under the water deep enough down to be out of reach of the moving ice. There’s evidence of ice scouring on the bottom down to depths of 250 feet, and there are pressure ridges which cause formations to a depth of anywhere from thirty to a hundred feet. When we lay pipe under the water we have to do it under the worst conditions in the world. You can get temperatures ranging down to 50° below zero here, and with any kind of a wind the chill factor can go down to 100 or 120 below. Those are temperatures which can kill a man and destroy equipment. Metal becomes brittle, and machinery and pipe can crack and become useless. For a rigid metal pipe, the ice has to be opened in long sections and the pipe has to be contoured exactly to the bottom. It has to be ballasted, not only to get it down as far as we might have to go, which could be up to 2,000 feet in some channel crossings, but because when you get it down there the gas itself has so much lifting power.

“In addition you have to make a trough in the bottom to take the pipe so that if the ice does scrape along the bottom in the shallower areas it won’t rip it up.

“There’s another problem with metal pipe, too. Once you get it down a thousand or two thousand feet, how do you maintain it? Or if you make a mistake, how do you get it back up again for repair? On top of all that, there are other natural hazards. In some of the channels between the islands there are currents which have to be dealt with above the 600-foot level, and of course you have to do much of your work in total darkness during the dead of winter. There’s no sunlight at all here except a bit of twilight around noon. The summer months, July, August and September, are just as bad, because then the ice tends to open, leaving stretches of water. It shifts, but it never goes away.

“So you can see that putting a pipeline beneath the ice is a hundred times more difficult than laying pipe across tundra and permafrost. It’s little wonder that from the beginning of this research work we’ve had many failures and no successes.”

The President nodded his agreement and took a long sip of his bourbon and soda. Magnusson went on.

“One thing I want to stress, Mr. President, is that no matter what we come up with in an operational under-ice pipe, there’s no way that pipe can be used to carry oil. The ecology here is very delicate. Bacteriological activity is virtually non-existent and the amount of wildlife that lives on the ice and in the water is enormous. If we had an oil-spill under the ice, there’d be no way of getting it out. It would be permanent and a total disaster for the eco-system.

“So we’re not talking about oil, Mr. President, although there has now been a major oil pool discovered here on Melville. Moving the oil is a job for the big airplane.”

The President said, “I agree. We’re damn lucky that the Resources Carrier is in prototype and it looks as if it will be ready to go soon. We’re going to be able to use it to carry crude oil from Melville to New York State direct. That’s the only thing we’ve been able to get out of the Canadian government in the last four years — consent to take the crude oil from Melville — but it’s the gas that’s the key.”

The President stopped, took a long sip, and said, “But don’t let me interrupt, Harold. You have the floor.”

“Well, sir, let’s look at the next model. It’s a working model, because I can move some of the parts as we go along, particularly at the location of the pipe in the water. This is a side view of the channel between Melville and Byam Martin, the 12-mile stretch. It’s as much as 750 feet deep in places. At the top of the water is a layer of ice ranging from four to nine feet thick, although there are some pressure ridges as thick as one hundred feet. That’s the ice we had to get through in order to get the pipe down.

“Now what I’ve gone for is the use of a flexible plastic pipe rather than metal. My predecessors — and there were three of them — were locked to the use of metal pipe, ranging from a big one 148 inches in diameter to a series of smaller ones in spaghetti form. Apparently they hadn’t even thought of the potential of plastic. Certainly they never tried it. In their work the metal became so brittle before it was put into the water that it cracked under the ice. Or, if they could get it down without cracking, the joints broke. They ran into problem after problem. In fact, it got so bad that after the third man quit, the Polar Gas group almost gave up. But by that time they’d sunk about $70-million into the project and didn’t want to quit without one more try.

“Now here’s a sample of my pipe. The plastic is plain, old-fashioned neoprene. It’s enormously flexible and impervious to the cold. It’s thick enough to stand a lot of internal pressure, but not strong enough on its own to take the fourteen hundred pounds per square inch that these pipes have to carry in order to get the natural gas through them in volume. So what I’ve done is to strengthen the outside walls by encasing the tube in a sheath of stainless steel mesh.

“When the pipe is lowered to the operational level of 600 feet below the surface, the plastic will collapse like a tube in a tire, but of course the stainless steel mesh will not. And the steel, being in mesh form, allows the pipe to remain totally flexible, which makes it easier for the divers to handle.

“We have it shipped in here in 50-foot lengths, and we set it in the water in spaghetti fashion, as you can see from the model. We need the capacity of a 48-inch diameter pipe. That’s the size they’ve used for the land pipelines. My plastic pipe is twelve-inch, so we tie sixteen of them together once they’re in the water.

“Now we’ve got a pipe that’s flexible enough and can still stand the pressure we have to put through it. But there’s one major problem with any pipe under water, and that is the enormous lifting force of the gas inside. What we have to do is to create a ballast system all along the line and tie the pipe to it. Then it gets to be quite a tricky job, because the ballast system has to be capable of letting the pipe up for servicing work and at the same time keeping it under control despite the buoyancy. This is the thing we can’t really predict with certainty without a live test, so I’ve run two lines, using different ballast and control systems, as you can see.

“The first system is really quite simple in principle, and it’s the one I hope will work because it’s by far the easiest to lay. What it boils down to is a series of enormous cement blocks resting on the bottom and attached to the pipeline by a cable system, running through pulleys at the pipeline and at the block. The end of the cable is held up by a buoy floating just under the ice. We can get at it very easily. The pulleys on the cement blocks have locks on them. To lower the pipe, I can pull up on the cable at the surface, and then when I release the pull the locks operate and the pipe is held in its new position. To raise the pipe, I release the locks with a separate control cable.

“Frankly, I’m concerned about that system. With the currents and other forces operating on the pipe, I’m not sure that it’s going to work, so we’ve designed an alternative system which is more complicated but gives us greater control.

“You can see from the model that the second pipeline is attached to a series of towers every few hundred feet. The towers are approximately 120 feet high, although we’ve adjusted that in places where the floor of the channel is very uneven. The towers are a little like water-towers. At the top there’s a tank which is the key to the whole system. Each tower carries many tons of ballast, and when I lower the towers into the water, the tanks are filled with air to provide buoyancy. When the pipeline has been attached to the tower just under the surface and all the towers are hooked on, we lower the whole thing at once. As I indicted, in the Byam Martin Channel the deepest point is about 750 feet. Once the system is resting on the bottom, we flood the tanks on the towers and let the ballast take effect. It’s really just like a submarine. When I want to raise the pipeline, I can open valves from the line into the tanks on each tower, blow the water out, and make the system sufficiently buoyant to come to the surface.

“Both the tower system and the cement block system have control valves along the pipeline, of course, so that in case of a break we can shut the flow of gas off instantly and bring the pipeline to the surface for repairs.

“Near the shoreline we have to be very careful because of ice scouring. We lay the pipe in a trench which we dig, using an automated dredge called The Crab, which can crawl along the bottom.”

The President shook his head in disbelief. “Son, I’ve got to hand it to you.” He finished off his bourbon and soda and asked, “How do you get the pipes put together and into the water?”

Magnusson replied, “We do it this way. Here at Melville we’ve carried the trench out to a point where the bottom is 200 feet down. Then we’ve made a series of holes in the ice all the way across to the other side. These sealholes, as we call them, are about 10 feet in diameter. We’ve set up domes over each one of them which can be heated and keep the surface of the water free of ice for as long as we want. Then we work our way across, feeding sections of the pipe through the sealholes to the divers working underneath. When we get a line completely across, we can then attach the next 12-inch section, and so on, until we build up the sixteen pipes we need in each line.

“Both pipeline systems are complete now and in position. The pipes are presently filled with seawater. When we’re ready to go with the experiment, we’ll put a plug of oil through to clean out the water. It will be blown from the Melville side straight across to the Byam Martin end, and out behind the water it’s shoving through. Behind the plug will come the gas which we’ll take up to operating pressure of 1400 pounds per square inch.”

The President broke in. “By the way, Harold, I’ve got to be out of here as quickly as possible when the experiment is finished. It want to be back in Resolute airborne by 8:15.”

“No problem there, Mr. President. We’ll get up shortly after five and be out to the main dome at the centre of the channel by six. We’re due to start to bring the line under pressure at 6:10, and we should know by 6:30 how things are going to go.”

“That’s fine, Harold, just great,” said the President. “You know, this is a fantastic effort. You’ve come up with a really ingenious arrangement. I’m looking forward to seeing how it goes tomorrow.”

“Well, Mr. President, we’ll be able to see, all right. I’ve got a television rig set up at the main sealhole and lighting down to pipe level, 600 feet, so that we can watch as the pressure is applied. And of course we’ve got all sorts of sensors set along the pipe to check on the effects as the pressure builds up.”

The President slid off his perch, straightened up, and said, “Son, I think you’d better let me at that steak. I’m starved.”

As the two men moved toward the door the telephone rang. Magnusson answered and then turned the phone over to the President. “It’s for you. Mr. Wolf calling from the 747.”

The President took the phone and said, “Yes, Irving.”

Wolf’s voice came back. “Prime Minister Porter has been trying to reach you, Mr. President.”

“Well, I can’t talk to him right now, Irving. We’re just going to eat. Let his people know that I’ll be available at 7:45, that’s 8:45 their time. I’ll be in touch with you then. O.K.?”

“I’ll pass the word, Mr. President.”

“By the way, Irving, the experiment that I want to see will take place here tomorrow morning shortly after six, so I’ll get back to Resolute by 7:45 and we can be out of there immediately.”

“I’ll tell Wypich, Mr. President. We’ll be set to go as soon as you get here.”