Essays

Long-form writing on place, economy, and environment.

Building for Hail

Calgary is in hail alley. The city knows it. The question is how much of that knowledge has been built into the roofs, walls, and deductibles of 600,000 households.

The Geography of Royalty

Alberta has extracted several trillion dollars’ worth of oil, gas, and bitumen from its subsurface. The public share of that wealth is determined by a royalty system. Understanding it requires understanding both the geology and the politics.

Smoke in the Lungs of the City

Wildfire smoke blankets Alberta for weeks each summer. Not everyone can close a window.

Winter as a Health System

At -40°C, pipes freeze, roads close, ambulances slow down, emergency rooms fill, and the most vulnerable people in the province face the highest cost. Cold is not background. It is infrastructure.

The Integrated Network

All four systems as a directed graph: max-flow min-cut, network centrality, and the full netback price surface

pipelines

network theory

max-flow

netback

graph theory

energy

Alberta

Crude Oil Pipelines

Darcy-Weisbach hydraulics, capacity utilization, and the netback price model

pipelines

hydraulics

energy

Alberta

economic geography

Natural Gas Transmission

The Weymouth equation for compressible flow and the AECO–Henry Hub basis differential derived from transport cost arithmetic

pipelines

natural gas

hydraulics

energy

Alberta

economic geography

NGL and Condensate Systems

The fractionation cascade, diluent supply chain, and the Cochin reversal

pipelines

NGL

fractionation

energy

Alberta

economic geography

Refined Products Distribution

Batch scheduling, the Cola equation for transmix volume, and terminal inventory design from Edmonton to Burnaby

pipelines

refined products

batch scheduling

dispersion

energy

Alberta

The Measurement State

Before a government can manage a territory, it has to see it. The sensors, registries, and observation systems that make Alberta legible to the state are also making it legible to everyone else.

The Distance to Care

Alberta has among the worst physician-to-population ratios in Canada. For most residents that is a statistic. For a growing number it is a geography — measured in hours and kilometres.

Fire Country

Fort McMurray showed what happens when fire reaches the wildland-urban edge. The WUI keeps expanding. The fire climate is changing. The two trends are running toward each other.

Physical Geography

Environmental Geography

The Insurance Geography

Insurance does not prevent disasters. It prices the geography of risk and decides who can afford to live where. In Alberta, that pricing is changing — and the changes tell you something important about where the hazards are.

Physical Geography

Economic Geography

Watching Water

Snowpack satellites, radar altimeters, and gravity sensors now make it possible to watch Alberta’s water budget from orbit. Here is what they are telling us.

Monitoring

Physical Geography

Capital Country

Canada has $1.8 trillion in growth waiting to be unlocked. Where it lives, what is blocking it, and why the province that anchors the largest sector is generating the uncertainty that kills long-horizon investment.

Economic Geography

The Warehouse Province

Alberta produces raw materials and exports them in bulk. Everything else arrives by truck. This is the infrastructure that makes that possible — and what it costs when it breaks.

Economic Geography

Who Pays for Sprawl

Every new suburb generates development fees and property taxes. It also creates kilometres of pipe, road, and wire that someone will have to maintain forever. The math rarely adds up.

After the Burning Strait

What changes when closure becomes a governed corridor

Economic Geography

Avalanche Country

The eastern slopes have always slid. What is changing is the season, the trigger, and the kind of instability now arriving from a warming mountain climate.

Physical Geography

The Classroom Arithmetic

Alberta’s education system is building schools for yesterday’s growth while a demographic pulse rolls toward secondary school

Urban Geography

Storm Country

Calgary sits where Arctic, Pacific, and continental air collide — and the bill is climbing

Physical Geography

Alberta Calling

How a province that spent a decade recruiting the world is learning to blame it for showing up

Economic Geography

Urban Geography

Hidden in Plain Sight

Calgary’s 8,000 hectares of urban nature: what the livability rankings capture, what they miss, and what happens when a city keeps adding people

Urban Geography

The Ideology of Extraction

Commodity, class, and the collapse of distance — from the Banda Islands to the Strait of Hormuz

Historical Geography

Economic Geography

Rockets and Feathers

Why Alberta pump prices spike overnight but fall for weeks — and whether this week’s crude crash will actually reach the forecourt

Economic Geography

Alberta’s Pipeline Geography

A Connected Province and the Infrastructure That Makes It So

energy

pipelines

Alberta

economic geography

The Checkout Problem

Alberta grows the food, drills the fuel, and still pays some of Canada’s highest grocery prices. This is why.

Economic Geography

Two Front Doors and a Mountain

Alberta tourism through flight patterns, spend trails, seasonal rhythms, and the places that arrival pressure is changing fastest

Economic Geography

Landlocked by Default: The Economic Geography of Alberta’s Connectivity Crisis

Economic Geography

The Burning Strait

A systems view of chokepoint activation, supply chain propagation, and the asymmetric geography of oil dependence

Economic Geography

Contested Ground

Global Energy Markets, War, Sanctions, and the Renewable Tide

Economic Geography

The Texas of the North

What the Comparison Actually Reveals — and What It Obscures

Economic Geography

A Trade Reality Check

What the Province Produces, What It Exports, and What It Needs From Everyone Else

Economic Geography

What Light Reveals

How a team of University of Alberta graduates put hyperspectral eyes in orbit — and made them free to use

Monitoring