Seaboard Scrubbing Plant

... A Seaboard Scrubbing Plant in the summer of 1925 initiated gas processing... The original plant consisted of six wooden grid packed scrubbers, each three feet in diameter by sixty feet in height, operating at a pressure of 315 pounds per square inch; two wooden grid packed pacifiers, each 15 feet in diameter by 54 feet in height, operating at atmospheric pressure; one 3 feet by 123 feet stack which carried off hydrogen sulphide gas to the atmosphere... This plant was enlarged... so that by 1928 it had a capacity of sixty million cubic feet per day... The facility was modernized in 1935 when the wooden grid type scrubbers were replaced by bubble cap type scrubbers. This change increased the capacity to seventy-five million cubic feet per day... (in 1941), a Girbotol unit with a normal capacity of fifty million cubic feet per day and an emergency capacity of seventy-two million cubic feet per day was installed...

A Dominion Government report for 1927 expressed the mood of the day:

... Sufficient evidence has now been obtained to prove that Royalite No.4 is not a freak and does not constitute the only well to be brought in, in the Turner Valley area. Further, the persistence of high pressure gas with an abnormal (sic) content of high grade naptha suggests that either below Turner Valley or somewhere in the vicinity, there must be a vast reserve of more normal (what does that mean?) oil awaiting discovery and development. (Could that writer have anticipated the Brown discovery of 1936?) The only remaining factor that is still open to doubt is whether the main body or pool is at a commercial mechanical depth, this doubt should be cleared up in the near future and it is safe to state that although the depth may be excessive, it will probably not be prohibitive as economies in drilling... must necessarily follow once the commercial producing stage is reached...

And Finally, from the pages of the CALGARY HERALD of July 9, 1934:

... The old Royalite No.4 well in 12-7-20-2-W5M, the original discovery well for the Madison wet gas field, isn't quite dead yet. The well had been shut in as non-economic about three years ago, after a prolonged attempt to clean it out... While the crew were bailing out mud, prior to running cement pumps, the hole gave a burst of gas... It appears that, although the pay zone was close to being depleted, giving the well a rest for three years has given it the recuperation it needed...

Despite the HERALD's news item, the well was actually abandoned in 1934 after having produced over 1 million barrels of condensate and 35 Bcf of gas (ERCB printout)!

The Royalite lease in empty now. Only a signboard (erected in 1956), showing the location a few hundred yards north of the present village of Tuner Valley, remains. Nevertheless this discovery opened the way for a boom which took its toll: the unforgivable waste of reservoir energy with the flaring of gas merely to get the liquids, depletion of high virgin pressures, the ever-present dangers of sour gas, all part of those pioneer days over 60 years ago.

From, Historic Turner Valley, Cradle of Westen Canada's Oil and Gas Industry, pg 80-81