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Petroleum production in Canada is a major industry which is important to the economy of North America. Canada is the fifth largest oil producing country in the world. In 2008 it produced an average of of crude oil, bitumen and natural gas condensate. Of that amount, 45% was conventional crude oil, 49.5% was bitumen from oil sands, and 5.5% was condensate from natural gas wells.〔 〕 Most of Canadian petroleum production, approximately , is exported.〔 〕 Canada is the largest single source of oil imports into the United States. The petroleum industry in Canada is also referred to as the Canadian "Oil Patch"; the term refers especially to upstream operations (exploration and production of oil and gas), and to a lesser degree to downstream operations (refining, distribution, and selling of oil and gas products). In 2005, almost 25,000 new oil wells were spudded (drilled) in Canada. Daily, over 100 new wells are spudded in the province of Alberta alone.〔(Canadian Rig Locator )〕 "Canada is the fifth-largest producer of natural gas and crude oil in the world with extensive oil and natural gas reserves across the country" ((http://www.capp.ca). ). ==History== (詳細はJames Miller Williams near his asphalt plant at Oil Springs, Ontario. At a depth of he struck oil, one year before "Colonel" Edwin Drake drilled the first oil well in the United States.〔 〕 Williams later went on to found "The Canadian Oil Company" which qualified as the world’s first integrated oil company. Petroleum production in Ontario expanded rapidly, and practically every significant producer became his own refiner. By 1864, 20 refineries were operating in Oil Springs and seven in Petrolia, Ontario. However, Ontario's status as an important oil producer did not last long. By 1880 Canada was a net importer of oil from the United States. Canada's unique geography, geology, resources and patterns of settlement have been key factors in the history of Canada. The development of the petroleum sector helps illustrate how they have helped make the nation quite distinct from the United States. The potential of Alberta as an oil-producing province long went unrecognized because it was quite different from American oil producing regions. the First Oil Well in Western Canada was drilled in southern Alberta in 1902, but did not produce for long and served to mislead geologists about the true nature of Alberta's subsurface geology. The Turner Valley oil field was discovered in 1914, and for a time was the biggest oil field in the British Empire, but again it misled geologists about the nature of Alberta's geology. In Turner Valley, the mistakes oil companies made led to billions of dollars in damage to the oil field by gas flaring which not only burned billions of dollars worth of gas with no immediate market, but destroyed the field's gas drive that enabled the oil to be produced. The gas flares in Turner Valley were visible in the sky from Calgary, away. As a result of the highly visible wastage, the Alberta government launched vigorous political and legal attacks on the Canadian Government and the oil companies that continued until 1938 when the province set up the Alberta Petroleum and Natural Gas Conservation Board and imposed strict conservation legislation. The status of Canada as an oil importer from the US suddenly changed in 1947 when the Leduc No. 1 well was drilled a short distance south of Edmonton. Geologists realized that they had completely misunderstood the geology of Alberta, and the highly prolific Leduc oil field, which has since produced over of oil was not a unique formation. There were hundreds more Devonian reef formations like it underneath Alberta, many of them full of oil. There was no surface indication of their presence, so they had to be found using reflection seismology. The main problem for oil companies became how to sell all the oil they had found rather than buying oil for their refineries. Pipelines were built from Alberta through the Midwestern United States to Ontario and to the West Coast of BC. Exports to the US increased dramatically. Most of the oil companies exploring for oil in Alberta were of US origin, and at its peak in 1973, over 78 per cent of Canadian oil and gas production was under foreign ownership and over 90 per cent of oil and gas production companies were under foreign control, mostly American. It spurred the National Energy Program under the Trudeau government. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Petroleum production in Canada」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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