This book was to have been a simple look at the history of the oil and gas industry in Alberta from its humble beginnings through to today. Things started quite inauspiciously in 1901 with the first oil discovery on Cameron Creek in today’s Waterton Lakes National Park. The word “discovery” might be a bit of a misnomer though as the First Nations people in the area had known about it for centuries. While the oil here was too deep to recover with the primitive equipment of the time, the oil exploration seed had been planted and drilling rigs would became a common sight throughout the province.
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But it would be more than ten years later that everything changed when Alberta’s first producing well, Dingman #1 came in. It was 1914 and overnight, the sleepy little town of Turner Valley south of Calgary, was transformed into a boom town and the economy of Alberta was forever changed. After the Second World War, as the Turner Valley reserves were beginning to dry up, Imperial Oil’s Leduc #1 came in and a vast new reserve was discovered just south of Edmonton.
Through the last half of the twentieth century something called the oil sands slowly emerged as the new giant in Alberta’s oil and gas industry and the story became even more interesting – and just a little bit complicated.
The value of Canada’s energy exports in 2008 was $126 billion, accounting for 6 per cent of the country’s GDP and 26 per cent of all Canadian exports. Throughout the 20th, century Albertans moved away from farms for the added prosperity of the city and millions of them raised their families on money earned in the oil patch.
There is a story here and story-telling is the driving force behind John McQuarrie’s trademark, ‘Then & Now’ look at the first century of the oil and gas industry in the province. In this richly illustrated title the reader is treated to a visual feast of over 275 images, many of which are arranged in artful pairings of an archival illustration alongside one of McQuarrie’s contemporary, colour photographs of this same view today. Woven into the imagery is a lively text adapted from a variety of industry, government and non-governmental organizations that will provide many sides of this multi-facetted tale that has so shaped the province of Alberta we know today.
