Last Chance Well
However, Imperial’s oil explorers, led by the enthusiastic Ted Link, now the company’s chief geologist, were not ready to throw in the towel. At a critical where-do-we-go-from-here strategy meeting held at the company’s Toronto headquarters in April 1946, senior members of the technical staff urged that they be allowed to make one last effort to find oil. The most promising prospect in their view was an area of central Alberta that began northwest of Edmonton and extended south through the town of Leduc and beyond.
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Imperial’s directors were less than thrilled with the idea of throwing more good money after bad. Many years later, Bill Twaits, who was then a director and was later to become president and chairman of Imperial’s board, recalled, “There was a major argument in the Imperial board, ending in a reluctant agreement to proceed with the test rather than immediately developing a final design on a gas-synthesis plant…. The word was ‘After $23 million [spent on fruitless exploration], this is final.” One month after the fateful meeting, the decision to drill in central Alberta received a strong endorsement from Imperial’s 32 staff geologists. Link had sent them a questionnaire asking them where they thought oil was most likely to be found in Western Canada. The plains of central Alberta were the first choice of 18 geologists and the second choice of another six. |
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The decision to select Leduc as the site of the first in the series of last-chance wells was taken after seismic testing- a technique used to determine the profile of subterranean rock structures- revealed an irregularity: an unexpected rise in the underlying Cretaceous formation. It was only a small anomaly- what is known as a “one-point-high”- and was likely of no significance, the geologists thought. But there was a slim chance that it could have oil trapped beneath it, and if Imperial was going to drill anywhere in the area, it might as well be on that anomaly.
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