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Oil companies appreciate Alberta's setup because they can acquire big blocks of land at low cost, and can plan their development programs over wide areas without expensive and time-wasting jumps from one small patch to another. Since Alberta normally permits only one well on each 40 acres, and sets a flow quota for each producing well, there is little indiscriminate wildcatting and practically no chance for a fly-by-night operator to move in on a good thing, sink a well near by and siphon off his neighbor's oil.
Few Great Fortunes. The policy is shrewdly beneficial to Alberta. The bargain rates for risk capital, plus the offerings of proved and semi-proved oil land for more reticent investors, provide something for everybody and have helped make Alberta's the world's fastest developing oilfield. This incentive to outside capital has not cost the province a penny. Its income from royalties and lease sales is just over half the oil-income dollar, roughly the same as the standard 50-50 split of profits instituted by U.S. companies now operating in Venezuela and the Middle East.
One thing that Alberta has missed because of its government oil policy is a bumper crop of Texas-type millionaires. Few great personal fortunes have been amassed. One of the rare exceptions is Eric Harvie, 59, of Calgary, who held the mineral rights on some 500,000 acres of Alberta land. Harvie got the rights seven years ago as payment from a company that could not raise cash to pay a legal fee. They are now worth about $50 million. But Multimillionaire Harvie goes in for no big-rich gestures. He drives a two-year-old Studebaker and lives in a modest house. Only one Calgary oilman, Frank McMahon, has got around to building a private swimming pool—and it is nothing to impress Hollywood.
Widespread Bounties. Alberta's oil bounties are spread thinly but widely among its 900,000 people. Upwards of 10,000 Albertans, whether $75-a-week roughnecks in the fields or new office boys in Calgary's bustling stock exchange, now make a living directly from Alberta oil. New schools, hospitals and highways, financed with government oil revenue, are abuilding up & down the province. Alberta has cut its taxes 7%, the first substantial provincial tax cut in Canada since the '20s. Its debt has been cut in half, and the province expects to be completely debt-free within twenty years.
Industry Imported. Aside from direct revenue, Alberta has reaped other lush benefits from her oil boom. Great pools of natural gas have been probed by the oil drills, raising Alberta's total gas reserves to 4.5 trillion cubic feet, supplying 90% of Canada's gas. So far, the Alberta government has banned gas exports, hoping to entice new industries to move into the province. The plan has worked to some degree. An affiliate of Celanese Corp. of America is building a $50 million acetate mill at Edmonton. The province's first pulp & paper mill is under way in the same area. Du Pont and other chemical companies are planning big Alberta plants.