The Great Canadian Oil Patch Synopsis

How Canada gave birth to the petroleum industry, and its development here, provide a gripping narrative for The Great Canadian Oil Patch: The Petroleum Era from Birth to Peak. Here you will read about:

• Abraham Gesner, the Nova Scotia farmer, horse trader, physician, geologist, chemist and father of the petroleum industry whose process to refine kerosene from hydrocarbons laid the industry’s foundation.
• James Miller Williams, who brought in North America’s first commercial oilwell at Ontario’s Oil Springs, and established the world’s first integrated oil producing, refining and marketing business.
• How Imperial Oil was launched by bootleg booze when 19-year-old Jacob Englehart arrived in Oil Springs to launder money from the illicit sale of whisky in New York, and became the principal founder of Canada’s largest oil company.
• The gigantic natural gas flares at Turner Valley that lit up the night skies of nearby Calgary and wasted $50 billion worth of oil and gas.
• The governor general and his financier son-in-law who triggered 40 years of failure and bankruptcies before a spread of half a million acres of scattered properties in Alberta yielded a fortune for others and a philanthropy, measured in 2005 dollars, of at least a quarter billion dollars.
• The 84 years of even greater struggle it took to tap the first commercial production from the world’s largest oil deposit, the Athabasca oil sands, now North America’s largest source of growing energy supplies.
• How Jack Gallagher’s Arctic oil vision led to the biggest loss of taxpayer money in the history of Canadian resource development, and one of the biggest bankruptcies.

Oil and gas mean more than just transportation and heat. They are primary sources of raw material for the houses we live in, and the clothes we wear, fertilizer and fuel to produce the food we eat, and the fuel we use for electricity. In The Great Canadian Oil Patch you will read about the profits and the pitfalls, meet the people, from scientists to scoundrels, who made it all possible, and learn how it was done.