Canada’s first gas plant, and a ravine of burning surplus you could read by
In 1911 William Stewart Herron found gas along the Sheep River southwest of Calgary. He bought the land, took leases and mineral rights from the Canadian Pacific Railway and the federal government, ran out of money, and went looking for investors; by July 1912 Archibald Dingman held a majority share. On 14 May 1914, after more than a year of drilling, wet natural gas sprayed out of the bore at Dingman No. 1. It was the first major strike in western Canada and the first major oil discovery in the country in 50 years.
Calgary Petroleum Products, where Dingman was a director, built a simple separator beside the well to make naphtha, a light liquid pure enough to burn in cars without refining. A new absorption plant finished in 1920 burned the same year, with flames rising 70 metres. Imperial Oil bought the company out and set up Royalite Oil, which rebuilt in metal and spaced the buildings widely so fire could not spread between them. A second discovery came in 1924, a scrubbing plant in 1925 and crude oil in 1936, and during the Second World War the field produced about 95 percent of Canada's oil.
The naphtha was worth money and the gas mostly was not. By one estimate 500 to 600 million cubic feet a day went up in flares, when Calgary used about 20 million. Chuck Moore, who grew up in 1920s and '30s Turner Valley, said that with the blind pulled you could still read a newspaper by the glow. The flares made night driving treacherous, early airplanes used them to find their beam for Calgary, and the reflection showed in the sky as far off as Medicine Hat. Promoters had operators throw a well wide open to send smoke rings up for investors. The waste led to legislation regulating flaring in 1932 and to the province's first oil and gas regulator.
The field's importance waned after crude oil was found at Leduc in 1947, but the plant kept running under a series of owners until 1985. It became a Provincial Historic Resource in 1989 and a national historic site in 1990, as the earliest and only surviving example of its kind in Canada. Its 22 metal buildings on 12.8 hectares by the Sheep River include the Horton Spheres, storage tanks from 1942 that became the plant's emblem, and the plant is now run as a historic site.
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