Little gasline impact expected at Sourdough Pete’s

Eleventh in series, recreational vehicle park owner expects little economic boost from an Alaska gas pipeline project in Fort St. John

Patricia Jones

PNA Contributing Writer

Bill and Sandra Cockwill know how to make long-term campers comfortable throughout the year at their recreational vehicle park located just south of this Alaska Highway community.

Called Sourdough Pete’s RV Park, the facility offers a place to stay for campers, whether they be tourists traveling up and down the Alaska Highway, or workers employed in the area’s oil and gas fields.

Road construction workers also frequent the RV park in Fort St. John, British Columbia, which offers full-service spaces even in winter months.

“We have water and sewer out to the sites,” Bill Cockwill said. “We have to have all the services or it would not make much sense for them to stay, to only sleep in a trailer. It’s their home.”

But as the cold sets in, costs to run the park go up. Residents typically buy and use electric plug-in heaters to supplement their propane gas heaters in their recreational vehicles. Heat tape to keep the water and sewer lines open and flowing also contributes to electric bills that are “thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars a month,” Sandra Cockwill said.

Despite close proximity to northern British Columbia gas fields and hydroelectric dam projects, utility bills seem to keep increasing in Fort St. John, the couple said. “It should be the cheapest in this area, but the further away you live, the cheaper it gets,” Bill Cockwill said.

Yet they don’t expect an economic reprieve, should a natural gas pipeline project bring Alaska’s North Slope gas south. “We didn’t see it in the last pipeline (the Alliance project), but maybe this will be different,” Cockwill said.

And the couple said they don’t anticipate an economic boost from an increase in customers, should that Alaska gas project be built.

“Oil companies usually bring their own camp — like a 400 to 500-man camp,” Cockwill said. “It’s not going to affect us much.”

Furthermore, the actual construction could bypass Fort St. John, depending on the route selected by developers. “They’ll go the shortest route, so it may be miles from the highway,” he said. “The pipeline could miss Fort St. John by 50 to 100 miles.”

An Alaska gas pipeline project will likely not make a huge impact on the community, which is already used to accommodating the ebb and flow of oil field workers, Cockwill said.

“This area gets used to little booms,” he said. “The oil patch is up and down all the time — nothing steady.”