Imperial Oil's Leduc Number 1 Well, 13 February 1947.
In November 1946, Vernon "Dry Hole" Hunter and a crew of four drillers and twenty-eight roughnecks began a round-the-clock drilling program in a farmer's field south of Edmonton. Four months later, the well showed encouraging signs at the 1,525-metre depth; so much so that Imperial began another well, Leduc Number 2, and invited the press out to the Number 1 well for a test run. About 500 reporters and spectators gathered in the snow-covered grain field as the valve was opened. When the flare pipe some 200 metres away was opened by a roughneck, flames roared 15 metres in the air, the mixture of oil, gas, water and mud sending up a dense, black cloud. Two hours later, the Alberta Minister of Mines, N.E. Tanner, turned a valve wheel to allow the first flow of crude into a storage tank.
Twenty years and 52 million cubic metres later, the Leduc-Woodbend fields were still flowing under their own pressure. Although Leduc was finally capped in 1984, it had proved to be the forerunner of several important adjacent fields plumbing the Devonian Reef oil: Redwater 80 kilometres to the northwest, which came in a year later in 1948; Golden Spike and Fenn-Big Valley to the southwest, which came in 1950-51; an on the same geological trend, Wizard Lake in 1951, Acheson, Bonnie Glen and Westrose in 1952. Together these fields yielded over 79 million cubic metres by 1967.
Courtesy: Public Archives of Canada, Imperial Oil Collection (C80876)
