"In the oil barrel there was locked the potential explosive engine that made possible the motor car, the aeroplane and the submarine, in it there was peace and war, the noise and tumult of the Great World War to come, fought with gasoline, in it was the transAtlantic flight of Lindbergh, the new Icarus, white winged across the sea, the humming of the transcontinental mail plane, the spluttering of the farm motor on the country road, the grinding of the irresistible tractor, and long procession on the highway with motorfuls of baskets, tents, and mattresses and children overflowing at the windows, all rushed by a series of explosions from the heat of the city to the cool waters of the motor camp.
In the Great Oil Age, which now is, all life moves along. Love and friendship, joy and sorrow move fast. Good news and bad news circulate the globe in a second. Kings rise and fall, republics roll over sideways, elections go off with a pop, so fast that each is forgotten before it is finished. And at the end the rapid motor hearse rushes Man to Oblivion with a last faint smell of gasoline as his requiem."
Stephen Leacock, "In Praise of Petroleum," Imperial Oil Review, 1930
This prophetic diagnosis by Canada's foremost humorist on the eve of Canada's entry into the Age of Oil was an astonishingly accurate if gloomy forecast of things to come. Just as coal had fired the British industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, oil fueled a major change in the North American and world economies in the twentieth. Canadian economic development shared directly in this technological revolution which saw oil displace coal as the fuel of land and water transport, and assume dominance of air transport and travel. Dieselization of rail and water transport began in the late 1930s, and in 1939 a new era in Canadian aviation history was ushered in by the first transcontinental flight. During the Second World War petroleum came to be used as a feedstock for industrial products such as synthetic rubber, plastics, fertilizers and chemical fibres; and by the mid-1950s Canadian consumption of oil stood only second to that of the United States. Between 1946 and 1955 Canadian consumption of primary energy products had shifted markedly from coal to oil and natural gas usage in reverse proportions of about two-thirds to one-third.
By 1967 more than one quarter of Canadian mineral development spending, over one billion dollars per year, was by the oil and gas industry and by 1979 it was spending eleven billion dollars per year. In 1978 Canadians consumed about 300,000 cubic metres of crude oil and some 128 million cubic metres of natural gas per day. To sustain anticipated increases in consumption, the industry is moving northwards and eastwards in search of further reserves. In 1978, Canada's proven reserves stood at an estimated 2.3 trillion cubic metres of gas, and about one billion cubic metres of oil, to which might be added further discoverable reserves of conventional oil (2.5-5.4 million cubic metres) and gas (4.1-8.3 million cubic metres), plus the potential of 39.7 billion cubic metres of synthetic crude oil from the tar sands development.
The huge investments and massive outputs that characterize today's petroleum industry are not typical of its early development. In its first phase, the oil and gas industry was a frontier resource industry, largely limited to Alberta. It did not become a net exporter of oil until 1930, and it was not integrated into the national energy economy and transportation system until after the Leduc discovery of 1947. Early oil entrepreneurs such as Sam Nickle, Eric Harvie, Bob Brown and Bill Herron were scarcely known in eastern business circles. The technology and language peculiar to the industry was confined to the Alberta "oil patch;" moreover the history of the industry was largely undocumented. Unlike the manufacturing sector, which enjoyed a long secular expansion, the petroleum industry was a highly uncertain, unsheltered industry existing without tariffs or capital incentives on the margin of the national economy. While Leacock's Great Oil Age was well underway in the consuming sector of urban Central Canada by 1930, its major producing sector in Western Canada still had not become an exporter after nearly thirty years of development.
The distance to markets in the industrial heartland of Canada was a major barrier to growth, one which the western oil industry shared with the region's other primary industries. Also, the location of the capital markets in Toronto and Montreal favoured mineral developments in their own hinterland. Certain geophysical features of the western region, such as the scattered distribution of oil and gas fields and their great depth also prevented rapid exploitation. The oil and gas pools or "pay zones" were buried from two to six kilometres in the undulating foothills of the Rockies, and drilling costs were prohibitively expensive even at the shallow depths (in 1947, about $150,000 for a well of 2,000 metres, and $800,000 for one of 3,500 metres). Measured against drilling costs in more accessible and richer fields in the Middle East and Venezuela, the Alberta fields were high risk and low yield ventures. Hence, much of their early development was unattractive to multinational oil companies, and was therefore left to smaller independents, which were generally unable to attract sufficient quantities of venture capital. The higher costs of frontier labour and the difficulties of drilling in rural areas already dedicated to farming and ranching further inhibited rapid resource development. The halting pace of the industry's first four or five decades of development was dictated by such barriers, each of which could only be overcome by major technological development or a dramatic shift in economic or political circumstances. The story of the "Age of Oil" in Western Canada has thus been one of uneven development: of uncertainty and periodic stagnation prior to the Leduc discovery of 1947, and of dramatic growth after it.
Early Discoveries to 1914
Europeans became aware of the existence of oil in the West in 1719 when a Cree Indian showed Henry Kelsey, the Hudson's Bay Company explorer, a clod of oil-laden sand from the Athabasca tar sands. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries several other fur traders and explorers, including Peter Pond, Alexander Mackenzie, Peter Fidler and Sir John Richardson, also recorded the phenomenon of oozing bitumen along the banks of the Athabasca River near Fort McMurray. But it was not until after Confederation that the prerequisites for the commercial development of the resources of the Northwest were met. These were: the acquisition of the Hudson's Bay Company lands in 1869; the building of a transcontinental railway to British Columbia from Central Canada; and the exploratory work of the Geological Survey of Canada in the 1870s and 1880s.
The Athabasca tar sands attracted the attention of surveyors, geologists and explorers. George Dawson, Director of the Geological Survey, described the frontier oil deposit in his 1878 annual report and continued over the next two decades to publicize the practically inexhaustible petroleum deposits in the Devonian sands. But the development of these enormous reserves was not to be realized in the early phase of the oil industry's development. They remained like a sleeping giant, a complex riddle that defied the efforts of government and private industry to separate the billions of barrels of oil from the sands they coated.
Meanwhile, discovery and development shifted to southern Alberta, to lands opened up by the Canadian Pacific Railway. While drilling for water along the main line, several minor discoveries of oil and natural gas had been accidently made in the 1880s and 1890s and a substantial gas flow had resulted at Langevin Station (Alderson) near Medicine Hat in 1883. Further discoveries were made there and the first commercial well was drilled in 1890. Inadequate means of transporting the volatile fuel any distance restricted its use to local firms and city street lighting. Since it was uneconomical to extinguish and relight them, these lights burned constantly, prompting Rudyard Kipling, the British poet, to exclaim on a visit in 1907 that Medicine Hat had among its many natural virtues, "all hell for a basement."
In 1874, the Canadian contingent of the North American Boundary Commission mapping the forty-ninth parallel towards the Rockies was informed by one of its packers, J.G. "Kootenai" Brown (a frontiersman educated at Oxford), of oil seepages on Cameron Creek. These had been known to the Indians of the Crowsnest Pass and Waterton areas for generations and the oil had long been used by them for medicinal purposes as a salve. Brown had used it to grease his farm machinery. Subsequent interest in the area's hydrocarbons was generated in the late 1880s, but it was not until 1901 that a Calgary company actually began to drill for oil. Using drilling equipment imported from the waning fields in Petrolia, Ontario (see Canada's Visual History, volume 56), the Rocky Mountain Development Company struck a modest pool of oil at 305 metres that generated a minor real estate boom at "Oil City" near Waterton by 1904. Several other wells were drilled, but most were dry, and by 1907 Oil City had produced only a few barrels of commercial oil. In the area of coal production, however, the Crowsnest region did show progress and later it yielded considerable quantities of natural gas found at much deeper levels.
The most significant of the pre-World war I production and marketing ventures were the natural gas fields at Bow Island and Viking in the Medicine Hat region. The impetus for the development of these fields came from the search for an assured gas supply for the rapidly growing city of Calgary.
The city itself became involved in granting franchises for the manufacture and distribution of artificial gas and the production of natural gas in 1903. The latter effort was spear-headed by an entrepreneur from Toronto, Archibald Wayne Dingman, who was awarded the Calgary Natural Gas Company franchise in 1905. It drilled two wells from 610 to 915 metres in the city, sufficient to supply gas for the Calgary Brewery and about fifty homes. The search for a supply adequate for the city as a whole was led by Eugene Coste, a consulting engineer with the C.P.R., with experience in the building of a gas pipeline and distribution system in southwestern Ontario. In 1911, Coste obtained leases on gas reserves farther to the west and formed the Prairie Natural Gas Company, later renamed the Canadian Western Natural Gas Company. In the same year, Dingman transferred the assets of the Calgary Natural Gas Company to Canadian Western, and the way was opened for the latter to claim the exclusive supply of the natural gas to the city. In 1912 the company started the construction of a 280-kilometre gas pipeline from Bow Island to Lethbridge and Calgary, and by 1913 several towns in southern Alberta such as Nanton, Claresholm, and Fort MacLeod were tied into a distribution system serving nearly seven thousand customers. Subsequently, Dingman and W.S. Herron, an Okotoks rancher and former hard-rock miner from Cobalt, Ontario, organized the Calgary Petroleum Products Company which brought a further supply of natural gas into production in 1914. Meanwhile, Calgary's rival city of Edmonton had to wait until 1923 to receive its supply of gas from the Viking Field only 130 kilometres away. By 1928 some 8,000 Edmonton homes were heated by the new fuel.
Turner Valley (1914-45)
In 1914 the Dingman Discovery Well ushered in an era of oil and gas development in Western Canada that was to span two world wars. Located in the Turner Valley, 55 kilometres southwest of Calgary, it was a relatively modest reservoir of naphtha-bearing gas but its discovery triggered an oil speculation boom in Calgary the day after the strike. On Friday, 15 May 1914, every available motor vehicle was pressed into service to carry to the foothills speculators who brought back optimistic reports. Five hundred paper companies were formed within the next few days, only one tenth of which actually undertook drilling operations. More than one million dollars in savings were withdrawn from Calgary banks by all classes of people, and printers made small fortunes producing glowing prospectuses and stock certificates. The newly formed Calgary Stock Exchange held its first meeting a week later, and by 30 May 1914 about eighty companies were incorporated with a capitalization of nearly $70 million. By the end of July 1914 the entire foothills country from the forty-ninth parallel to Rocky Mountain House had been leased from the federal government by oil speculators and prospectors. By the late summer there were four major stock exchanges in operation and an industry capitalized at about $400 million. Speculation was so rampant that storefront operations were set up along the main street of Calgary to handle the mobs in search of shares, and unscrupulous investors fleeced unwary customers. Given this frenzy the provincial government was forced to investigate the stock frauds and establish the Board of Public Utility Commissioners in 1915, which passed the Sale of Shares Act to regulate speculative abuses.
With the onset of the depression that accompanied World War I the boom collapsed. By the end of 1915 exploration and development had almost ceased in Turner Valley. Trading on the Calgary Stock Exchange plummeted, and in February 1917 the exchange suspended operations. Though this first boom was short-lived, it achieved several positive results, the first of which was the creation of the Board of Public Utilities. A royal commission was also established in 1916 to investigate fraudulent companies selling shares before receiving charters from the provincial government; and in 1921 the federal government replaced the Alberta Sales of Shares Act with legislation protecting the investor in those companies holding a charter from the dominion government. In addition to these legislative advances, there were several technological and business achievements. The Dingman Discovery Well became the deepest well ever to be drilled using cable-tool rig and manila cable when it reached 1,186 metres in 1916. Also, the first barrel of light gravity crude to be exported from Alberta was sent by Calgary City Council to Toronto to attract capital investment from eastern Canada. The results from this initiative were poor because the boom faltered, but a group of companies and entrepreneurs committed to the development of the Turner Valley Field were now firmly in place. Companies like Calgary Petroleum Products were joined by several other independent oil firms based in Alberta.
The Turner Valley Field had attracted the interest of larger capital. When the Calgary Petroleum Products plant burned down in 1920 and the owners sought operating capital to continue, Imperial Oil organized the Royalite Oil Company subsidiary, which assumed the holdings of Calgary Petroleum. Imperial, incorporated in 1880 out of several refineries in Petrolia and London, had already established marketing outlets in Central and Western Canada. It now moved actively into Turner Valley production and distribution. The parent company began construction of its Calgary oil refinery in 1921, and in the same year its Royalite subsidiary contracted to supply the city with a pipeline to Okotoks and the mainline. A more ambitious drilling program was begun into the lower Cretaceous sands, and in 1924 Royalite No. 4 blew in dramatically at 80-95 cubic metres per day of high quality light crude. This was delivered to the Imperial Refinery in Calgary by horse team until the first oil pipeline was constructed in 1925. By 1925 Royalite No. 4 had increased annual oil production in the Turner Valley by ten times over 1922 levels. Total gas production in Alberta shot up to over 255 million cubic metres, superseding Ontario's annual production of 200 million cubic metres for the first time.
The Royalite discoveries engendered the second Turner Valley boom; they brought a host of small producers into the field again, and over 200 wells were drilled between 1925 and 1935. Exploration and drilling were concentrated in the northern and central part of the field, and production was confined mainly to naphtha recovery. To secure the precious light crude, the gas was flared off and "Hell's Half Acre" could be seen as an eerie aura in Calgary's western skies. One of the more successful Calgary based firms during the second boom was the Home Oil Company. Enjoying substantial oil and gas production from 1925 to 1929, it was one of the few survivors to accompany Imperial's Royalite subsidiary into the depression. When the industry contracted, Home Oil sold off all of its wells to Royalite in return for much needed shares and capital which it used to acquire further development acreage in the north end of the Turner Valley field. It concentrated its efforts there in the thirties.
The third and last Turner Valley boom began in 1936 with a discovery symbolizing the persistence of the independent oil producers. R.A. Brown Sr. and several partners using a new rotary rig struck oil at 2,526 metres in the west Turner Valley field. Then the deepest well in Alberta, Royalties No. 1 produced over 110,600 cubic metres of high quality light crude over the next decade. To the end of the third boom in 1941 over 200 wells were drilled, nearly all of them producers. Indeed, because the quantity of crude yielded could not be handled by the Imperial refinery in Calgary, it began to establish internal production and marketing quotas unacceptable to the independent producers. For the first time, real market conditions existed for the conservation of energy resources; therefore the Alberta government established in 1938 a conservation board and a royal commission to investigate the petroleum industry.
Government intervention had begun in the 1920s with the activities of the Department of the Interior's western office in Calgary. Its small staff was concerned with regulations to prevent waste, reporting on drilling operations and management, and measuring the flow rates in gas and oil wells. In 1930, when the Province of Alberta gained control of its lands and natural resources a provincial petroleum and natural gas division was set up under the authority of the Oil and Gas Wells Act of 1931. Part of the technical staff of the federal department was simply transferred to the new ministry, which assumed jurisdiction over drilling on all Alberta lands. The act extended considerable authority to the provincial legislature; and the government, then headed by the United Farmers of Alberta, was thus empowered to conserve gas and oil, prevent waste and reservoir exhaustion, and control every aspect of production, transmission and sale of petroleum products. While flagrant abuses such as flaring-off huge gas reserves were identified by inquiries conducted by the Provincial Board for Public Utilities, no equitable agreement could be reached with the producers. With the passage of the Turner Valley Gas Conservation Act in 1932 and the prosecution of some of the delinquent companies the matter was brought to the Supreme Court. It upheld the right of the province to restrict production, but not to assess and monitor company activities. The conservation abuts continued until the oversupply crisis of the third Turner Valley boom persuaded the producers to call for government aid and regulation.
A three-man Petroleum and Gas Conservation Board became responsible in 1938 for carrying out earlier conservation legislation when the Oil and Gas Conservation Act was passed by William Aberhart's Social Credit government. Having sought the advice of the United States' Bureau of Mines, the Minister of Provincial Mines and Lands hired Texan William F. Knode as the expert to head the Conservation Board because of his experience working with Texas' association of producers to implement voluntary conservation measures. In Alberta, Knode worked closely with the federal and provincial branches responsible for conservation, such as the Provincial Board for Public Utilities. The board was quick to report on the considerable loss of crude oil production due to the sad state of reservoir and pressure depletion in the Turner Valley field. It then established monthly market quotas and limited producers to one well per thirty acres. The demands of wartime subsequently escalated the pressure on the Turner Valley field. While the Conservation Board recommended a ceiling of 79 cubic metres per day, the federal Oil Controller doubled it to push total wartime production to nearly 158 million cubic metres, ninety-five per cent of total Canadian output. Although regulation came too late for the Turner Valley, experience in conservation was gained that paid dividends later.
For the future of the petroleum industry, as it moved from provincial to a regional and national scale, the Turner Valley Field was a vital proving ground. Infrastructures of expertise and technology were developed and tested in an era that saw the depth at which effective drilling could occur doubled as cable-tool rigs and wooden derricks were superseded by new rotary rigs and steel head frames. Calgary, with such dynamic local entrepreneurs as Brown, Herron and Nickle, became the urban organizer of the petroleum hinterland. The field's main towns and villages - Turner Valley, Black Diamond, Hartell, Little Chicago and Little New York became home for explorers, drillers, well operators and their families. When the region was depleted after the war, many moved on but they carried with them vital field experience in an increasingly complex technology.
The North, Edmonton's Hinterland,
and Leduc (1914-50)
Largely by virtue of better terrain and transport, southern and central Alberta led production and distribution, while the North proved a stubborn and unyielding subject of the industry's interest and explorations. The Athabasca tar sands remained a gigantic riddle to researchers and entrepreneurs alike; the Mackenzie River country of the Far North beckoned hardy and adventurous geologists and field crews, backed by companies and governments prepared to risk long-term development capital; and, the hinterland of Edmonton remained as yet an unexploited region.
The tar sands' story in the early twentieth century revolves around three young scientists, Sidney C. Ells, Karl Clark and S.M. Blair. A mining engineer with the Geological Survey of Canada and the Department of Mines, Ells began, in 1913, a lifelong interest in tar sands exploration and recovery techniques that saw him actively trying to persuade governments and business that their development was viable. Karl Clark and S.M. Blair, chemists with the Alberta Research Council, succeeded in persuading the provincial government to haul carloads of bituminous sands for testing as potential road-surfacing material. This venture proved technically viable but uneconomic; therefore Blair and Clark continued to experiment in the 1920s with separation processes that used hot water and steam methods. While the scientists continued their search for an efficient and economic separation process, several entrepreneurs secured leases from the federal and provincial governments to extract oil from the sands. One of the first companies to establish operations was Abasands Oils, which worked throughout the depression and built, by 1940, a 360-tonne separation unit.
Another pioneering company was Alcan Oils and International Bitumen, which experimented at Bitumount with in situ hot water separation. By 1929 it was producing a heavy bitumen that sold as roofing tar and road surfacing material. Both companies were ultimately taken over by government during the Second World War, Abasands by the Dominion government and Bitumount by the Alberta government. Both invested considerable sums towards the development of pilot plants to carry on the research initiated by Ells, Clark and Blair.
The Norman Wells area along the Mackenzie River was another northern location of considerable interest to the industry throughout the interwar period. Imperial Oil staked claims there in 1914, sent exploration crews 2,400 kilometres north of Edmonton in 1919, and struck oil in a field that measured about one-half of the potential reserves of Turner Valley in 1920. The remoteness of the location, however, militated against its development by Imperial to anything more than an 80 cubic metre a day refinery built in 1933 to support mining operations in the Far North. During the Second World War, Alaska's strategic importance produced the Alaska Highway Project which, in turn, necessitated the establishment of a locally based oil supply. The Canol Project, a joint government effort in conjunction with Imperial Oil, resulted, its objective being to build a pipeline from Norman Wells to Whitehorse during the war and a further extension to Watson Lake in the Yukon and Skagway, Alaska, after the war. After the war, Norman Wells remained a crucial source of supply to the northern mines and the DEW line, although the main refinery at Whitehorse was dismantled and taken to Edmonton in response to refinery demand for Leduc crude oil. The idea of a Norman Wells pipeline project was revived in the late seventies, this time to follow the Mackenzie River Valley northwards.
Between the wars, northern Alberta and the urban hinterland south and east of Edmonton were continuously explored but the overall results were disappointing. The pools in this region were often too viscous and were embedded in shallow formations of less than 760 metres. Since they required much more refining than the higher quality Turner Valley crude, their development awaited the gradual depletion of those reserves. Some of the early fields of this type were at Wainwright (1925) and Lloydminster (1939). The latter yielded a heavy crude suitable for railway diesels which was purchased by Canadian National Railways when conversion from steam locomotives began during the 1930s. Significant exploration, discovery and development did not take place in the region until after World War II.
When Imperial's Leduc Discovery Well blew in on 13 February 1947 conditions were ripe for a major find. From 1919 to 1947 Imperial had spent about $23 million in geological exploration and drilling in Western and Northern Canada, but had discovered little since Norman Wells in 1920. In the year of this important find, 88 per cent of the 11.2 million cubic metres of crude oil refined in Canada was imported, and plans were even being made to import oil to the prairie provinces. Other alternatives such as the production of synthetic oil from natural gas and tar sands were also discussed. In a last exploratory push, Imperial conducted seismic exploration and drilling on a lease of 730,000 hectares acquired from the Alberta government. It discovered at Leduc reserves of 51.8 million cubic metres, nearly three times the potential of the Turner Valley. With this and other finds in the Leduc area, Alberta suddenly became a major oil-producing and exporting region. Plans were quickly set in motion to build what was then the longest pipeline in the world from the production fields to refineries and markets in Central Canada and the American Midwest.
The Last Thirty Years: Retrospect and Prospect (1950-80)
The most recent phase of oil and gas development in Western Canada has witnessed remarkable growth and expansion. The exploration and production base has widened into Saskatchewan and British Columbia, and, in the North, the Beaufort Sea and arctic islands. Marketing, export and distribution have kept pace with the further development of natural gas pipelines to Central Canadian and American markets. And, at the same time, both provincial and federal governments have attempted to regulate the industry in the areas of conservation, export quotas, and pricing. The participation of the public sector has become the key not only to northern exploration and development, but also to the realization of mega-projects concerned with northern pipelines, the tar sands, and petrochemical development.
In the 1950s and 1960s major oil companies were increasingly active both in and out of Alberta. Over 316 million cubic metres were added to the production reserves with the discovery of the Pembina oil field in 1953 and Swan Hills in 1957. In the mid-sixties two other discoveries in the northwestern corner of Alberta, Rainbow Lake and Zama, contributed another major pool. Smaller yet sizeable oil finds were made in southwestern Manitoba in 1951 and in southern Saskatchewan and northern British Columbia in 1955. Within Alberta, natural gas finds continued to build most impressive reserves with major discoveries occurring in the southwest corner of the province, at Pincher Creek and Waterton, and west of Calgary at Jumping Pound in the 1950s; and in the southeastern corner of the province and the Peace River region of the northwest in the seventies. Discoveries in northern British Columbia at Fort St. John and Fort Nelson and in the Arctic have contributed to a growing pool of gas used for export and as feedstock for Alberta's rapidly expanding petrochemical industry.
The construction of pipelines to markets and of petrochemical industries located mainly in Central Canada has been a controversial feature of this last phase of growth. In 1953, following quickly on the first Interprovincial oil pipeline to eastern Canada in 1950, came the Transmountain oil pipeline to Vancouver which fed the growing demand for oil in Washington State and the lower British Columbia mainland. The Trans-Canada gas pipeline of 1956 to 1967 was easily the largest and most hotly debated pipeline of the postwar era. Entrepreneurs backing this line had been encouraged by the grant in 1955 of an export permit to Westcoast Transmission to export Peace River natural gas through British Columbia to the American Northwest. After a complex series of corporate manoeuvres, the Trans-Canada Pipeline Company was authorized by the federal government to build a pipeline eastward to Ontario and Quebec, with the assurance from the Alberta Conservation Board that there was a sufficient surplus of gas to export. The result was the successful completion of the enormous project in 1958, but the ultimate defeat of the Liberal government which had sponsored it in 1957. The enormous costs and the complexity of such projects made pipelines the unavoidable subjects of political controversy. This contentiousness was evidenced again in the 1976 and 1977 National Energy Board hearings regarding the building of the Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline. In the end, the Canadian Arctic Gas Consortium's application was rejected in favour of the less environmentally hazardous Foothills line preferred in the recommendations of the Berger Commission Judicial Inquiry of 1977.
The crucial role of government in energy matters, which had from the beginning been fundamental to exploration, discovery, development and conservation, intensified in the production and transportation sectors in the 1970s. Beyond the regulatory powers of such bodies as the National Energy Board and the Alberta Conservation Board, there also developed a direct government presence in ownership. The participation of the federal and provincial governments in the Syncrude Tar Sands Agreement of 1975 climbed to thirty per cent equity via a complex arrangement. Moreover the Alberta Energy Company, a provincially controlled public corporation, built the Alberta Oil Sands pipeline in 1977, which by 1980 had transported eight million cubic metres of crude from Fort McMurray to Edmonton. Heavy involvement of Alberta Energy in major pipeline and petrochemical projects demonstrated a strong government profile in the production sector, and similarly, the federal presence greatly expanded through the federally owned Crown corporation, Petro-Canada, which acquired control of several oil companies including Atlantic Richfield, Pacific Petroleum and Petrofina during the period from 1976 to 1980.
Through the increasing emphasis on frontier exploration, development in the North, and eastern offshore exploration, Western Canada's petroleum industry matured into a complex conglomeration of private and public, national and international, interests. From an industry largely confined in the early part of the century to southern Alberta, it expanded its producing hinterland to the high Arctic and Atlantic offshore, its transportation networks by thousands of kilometres, and its financial and technical expertise by staggering proportions. Its story has been of dramatic resource development in the postwar era, solidly based on pioneering scientific, technical and entrepreneurial efforts. The cadre of sedimentary geologists, seismic teams, roughneck drilling crews, and high-risk entrepreneurs was and is at the core of this complex web of enterprise which has evolved and been refashioned over the last hundred years.
