Imperial Oil's Moose Jaw Plant, circa World War I.
Refining and warehouse operations were primitive before the construction of major refineries during and after World War I. Crude oil was often of inferior quality with high sulphur content, and the term "skunk oil" was used to describe the foul odours emitted upon combustion. Much of the raw well-head gasoline drawn from the Turner Valley field was of this unrefined variety, and early automobiles thus fueled fumed noxious odours and stalled as the gas vapourized in the carburetor.
Early bulk plants, such as this one at Moose Jaw, depended heavily upon draft horses for transportation of oil in barrels from the railway and to early service station outlets. One of the first gas stations in Western Canada was a pump outlet placed outside Imperial Oil's Vancouver warehouse on Smythe and Cambie Streets in 1907. Imperial had already opened its first bulk plant in Calgary in 1902, and by 1909 had forty distributing stations throughout Western Canada. The number of automobiles in Canada increased to a half million by World War I, and gasoline supplanted kerosene as the prime product of the refineries, moving from 10 per cent to 26 per cent of production between 1909 and 1919.
The barrels in this photograph are steel except for the one beside the wheel barrow in the left foreground. Before 1910, barrels were usually oak and most often were filled with kerosene heating oil. They were shipped directly to farmers who picked them up at railway sidings and paid a $1.25 deposit for the barrel. This amount was usually forfeited as the barrels could be used as washtubs, rain barrels, and even cut down into chairs. With their displacement by steel barrels in 1911 the deposit fee rose to $8, but they still proved difficult to recover since marketing managers could not convince busy salesmen to retrieve them.
Courtesy: Public Archives of Canada, Imperial Oil Collection (PA 96423)
