Drawing The Line: An environmental history of the Westcoast Transmission natural gas pipeline, 1948-1982

This dissertation is an environmental history of Westcoast Transmission Company Limited (Westcoast), which built Canada’s first big-inch natural gas pipeline and inaugurated large-scale natural gas usage in British Columbia. The study starts in the late 1940s, when the company was founded, and ends in 1982 when it effectively concluded its first encounter with substantial public resistance to its natural gas pipeline ventures. The dissertation asks to what extent Westcoast shaped human-nature relations and argues that Westcoast’s energy transition was about more than technological innovations and economic questions of supply and demand. Instead, natural gas usage and exploitation were intertwined with gender identity, community building, geopolitical questions, colonial ambition, and the definition of modernity. Relying primarily on three archival collections in two Canadian cities, parts of which are newly available to the public, this dissertation explains how Westcoast developed, operated, maintained, and expanded its complex energy system and sheds light on Canada’s relatively late transition to fossil fuels and the persistent nature of Canada’s fossil fuel reliance.