By Doug Matthews -- The poetry behind the building of a natural gas pipeline

We need commodity, firmness and delight, says Sir Henry Wotton

On the surface, it’s a simple idea, one that small boys and girls know seemingly from birth. Find a few bits of wood or metal, put them together in some fashion, hold them in place with glue or tape or – as one gets older and more adept – screws, and something new, something not there before, becomes. That’s called building things. That’s what boys do.

And a lot of them will do it all their lives. They’re called builders: They are the architects and engineers who will design and build the structures the world will need to store things and to move stuff in the years ahead.

And, really, when you get right down to it, those are the two things that building is all about – making a structure to shelter people, boxes, theatre screens, hospital beds or computers from the elements, or one that allows things to move, infrastructure like roads, bridges, tunnels and pipelines.

Of this latter group, pipelines are unique in that they fulfill both of the functions of building – they provide the means to move the gas or the oil and they serve to contain the commodity because oil and gas, unlike boxes and people and computers, are fugacious, they flow. If they’re not contained, they can leak all over the place. Kind of like what seems to happen in BP’s pipelines in Alaska.

It’s those pesky BP pipeline leaks that tell folks that the company is perhaps missing one or more of 16th century English poet Sir Henry Wotton’s three elements of building well: commodity, firmness and delight. “Commodity” refers, wouldn’t you know, to the usefulness of the thing being built – if it’s not useful, why build it? “Firmness” is the strength of the structure – if it’s weak, it will fail. And last, “delight” means the pleasure given by the thing being built. Is it designed to please the eye, is it a structure worth looking at?

Unless you love the sight of a pipeline, it looks like BP only hit one nail on the head.

Why is the attention to these three elements so important? It’s just a building, a road, a pipeline after all. Well, no, it’s not. If a building, it can expect to live a hundred years. If a road, centuries, like those of the Romans, and if a pipeline, 60 years or more.
Good builders know this. So did John Ruskin, the 19th century English art critic, who taught that “when we build, let us think we build for ever.”

Engineers ought to know this. That’s what the little iron ring on the small finger of their dominant hand is all about. It’s put there to remind new engineers of the duty of care they owe to those who will use their designs.

But, sadly, not all that is planned to be built actually gets there. Money runs out, clients change their minds, the gas fields dry up, dreams die.

That may be today’s risk with the Mackenzie Gas Project. The dream may die. Shrinking continental demand, the recession, significantly increased supply (whether from newly developing shale formations or distant liquefaction terminals), falling prices, rising costs, unsettled land claims and a burdensome regulatory regime may all conspire to put an end to the dream.

And, oddly enough, just like the poets and the artists who spoke of the standards for building, it was another artist, Shakespeare, who set out for us how a planned building may come to meet such a sad fate. We find it in Henry IV, Part 2, written way back in 1597.

As the Archbishop and his three fellow conspirators meet to plan their next move against King Henry and his armies, it is Lord Bardolph who uses a building metaphor to caution against overconfidence in their campaign.

Let us remember, says Bardolph, that we begin by surveying what we mean to build, then, with the idea of what we want clearly in mind, we “rate the cost of the erection,” and, if we can’t afford it, go back to the drawing board for a new design. And, if that doesn’t work, we give it all up, we “at last desist to build at all.”

This, then, is the challenge for the Mackenzie Gas Project – to have the ability to overcome all the issues it faces and, for the good of the North and its people, actually get built. We must not desist, for, if we do not build, the North will suffer long.

And so, with luck, the pipeline goes ahead, the future is bright, the North grows, and the gas – and royalties – flows south.

But at least we get Henry Wooten’s three elements, the commodity, the firmness and the delight. Well, actually, we don’t get the delight (and not just because you might not like the site of a pipeline): The damned thing will be buried three feet under ground.