Calgary, AB – Head Office

While agriculture and railway activities were the dominate aspects of Calgary’s early economy, the Turner Valley Discovery Well blew South-West of Calgary on May 14, 1914 marked the beginning of the oil and gas age in Calgary. Archibald Wayne Dingman and Calgary Petroleum Product’s discovery was heralded as the “biggest oil field in the British Empire” at around 19 million cubic metres, and in a three-week period an estimated 500 oil companies sprang into existence. Calgarians were enthusiastic to invest in new oil companies, with many losing life savings during the short 1914 boom in hastily formed companies.

Outbreak of the First World War further dampened the oil craze as more men and resources left for Europe and agricultural prices for wheat and cattle increased. Turner Valley’s oil fields would boom again in 1924 and 1936, and by the Second World War the Turner Valley oilfield was producing more than 95 per cent of the oil in Canada. hHowever the city would wait until 1947 for Leduc No. 1 to definitively shift Calgary to an oil and gas city.