“The high-paying, fast-growing oil industry wasn’t just welcome, it was embraced as savior. And it was.”

 

Not so long ago—but also ‘forever’ in the weird alchemy that is Covid time—we published four issues of Natural Resources Magazine a year. Launched in 1998, it was a separate title dedicated to resource development in Atlantic Canada. It covered farming, forestry, fishing and aquaculture, and dug deeper (pun intended) into mining. But its dominant subject was petroleum. Specifically, Atlantic Canada’s offshore oil and gas bonanza, something we rarely hear about anymore. How quickly we forget.

I think it’s fair to say 1998 was the beginning of peak oil for the N.L. offshore. It was the Hibernia oil field’s first full year of operation and Hibernia B-16-1 set a new Canadian record with a flow rate of 56,000 barrels per day. Development plans for the Terra Nova oilfield were also announced in 1998 while Cohasset-Panuke, an oil development offshore Nova Scotia, was still in production.

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