The crucial role of government in energy matters, which had from the beginning been fundamental to exploration, discovery, development and conservation, intensified in the production and transportation sectors in the 1970s. Beyond the regulatory powers of such bodies as the National Energy Board and the Alberta Conservation Board, there also developed a direct government presence in ownership. The participation of the federal and provincial governments in the Syncrude Tar Sands Agreement of 1975 climbed to thirty per cent equity via a complex arrangement. Moreover the Alberta Energy Company, a provincially controlled public corporation, built the Alberta Oil Sands pipeline in 1977, which by 1980 had transported eight million cubic metres of crude from Fort McMurray to Edmonton. Heavy involvement of Alberta Energy in major pipeline and petrochemical projects demonstrated a strong government profile in the production sector, and similarly, the federal presence greatly expanded through the federally owned Crown corporation, Petro-Canada, which acquired control of several oil companies including Atlantic Richfield, Pacific Petroleum and Petrofina during the period from 1976 to 1980.
Through the increasing emphasis on frontier exploration, development in the North, and eastern offshore exploration, Western Canada's petroleum industry matured into a complex conglomeration of private and public, national and international, interests. From an industry largely confined in the early part of the century to southern Alberta, it expanded its producing hinterland to the high Arctic and Atlantic offshore, its transportation networks by thousands of kilometres, and its financial and technical expertise by staggering proportions. Its story has been of dramatic resource development in the postwar era, solidly based on pioneering scientific, technical and entrepreneurial efforts. The cadre of sedimentary geologists, seismic teams, roughneck drilling crews, and high-risk entrepreneurs was and is at the core of this complex web of enterprise which has evolved and been refashioned over the last hundred years.
