EARLY DEVELOPMENT IN THE CANADIAN GAS PROCESSING INDUSTRY: THE TURNER VALLEY EXAMPLE

Introduction Canada was the first nation which found itself forced to treat large quantities of natural gas containing high percentages of hydrogen sulphide. In the early years Canadians worked with what was available, and in later years went on to pioneer some of the production techniques, a number of the processing procedures, and some of the metallurgy required to meet the challenge. Prior to the building of the Trans Canada Pipe Line and the West Coast Transmission Pipe Line in the mid-1950s most of the natural gas used did not contain elevated levels of hydrogen sulphide. Exceptions were, first, the Madison Natural Gas Company plant at Turner Valley, Alberta and later, the Texaco installations at Bonnie Glen and the Shell facility at Jumping Pound. The building of the two pipelines meant that there was a growing demand for natural gas, and to meet it, much on the natural gas with high levels of hydrogen sulphide and CO2 is widely distributed in nature and is a minor component of air. It is highly soluble in water and oil, especially under pressure. In water, it occurs as carbonic acid, a weak acid that can donate one or two hydrogen ions in neutralization reactions that produce bicarbonate HCO3- and carbonate CO3-2 salts or ions. CO2, being an acid in water, reacts instantly with NaOH or KOH in an alkaline water mud, forming carbonate and bicarbonate ions. Similarly, it reacts with Ca(OH)2 (lime) to form insoluble calcium carbonate and water. ">carbon dioxide along the Rocky Mountain foothills and in northeastern British Columbia was required. The Madison plant, owned by the Royalite Oil Company, was a pioneering effort and was the first sizable plant in Canada to begin treating natural gas containing high levels of hydrogen sulphide. Turner Valley had the first gas processing plant for Canadian Petroleum Products west of Ontario. It was in Turner Valley that the first compressor was installed in Canada to deal with wet gas, and the second absorption plant anywhere in the world was built there to strip all the saturates from the sour gas. Furthermore, in 1933 lean oil absorption plant was the first of its kind in Canada, and its operational life of fifty-two years made it the longest running absorption plant in Canada and one of the oldest plants of its kind in North America. The Girbotol sour gas scrubbing units, added in 1941 and 1952, were the first and last of their kind in Canada. Finally, among the more significant "firsts," the Turner Valley facility was the first sour gas scrubber in Canada, while the plant's propane unit, installed in 1952, grew out of the oldest propane unit in the province, having been established in 1948 by an entrepeneur who sold it to Royalite. With the Shell Oil installation at Jumping Pound, Alberta, Madison had one of the first plants in Canada to turn hydrogen sulphide into elemental sulphur. On another level, this facility is a good example of how technology was adapted to meet the need of the Turner Valley sour gas stream, and of how creative tinkerning on the part of the engineers and maintenence staff impoved processing techniques, enhnaced productivity and maintained or raised profits. Royalite and the Madison Natural Gas Company Limited's (Royalite #1) plant was in a unique position to obtain and work with early gas processing technology, to train industry employees and to make an impact on the petroleum industry in general. From an industrywide perspective, it served as a training ground for many in the petroleum industry who later went on to establish Canada's repuation for competence, not only in the area of natural gas processing, but in petroleum exploration and production as well. NATURAL GAS AND TURNER VALLEY The Turner Valley oil and gas field is located approximately 42 kilometers (25 miles) southwest of Calgary. It streched from north of Millarville to south of Longview, and area about 64 km (40 miles) long by 12.8-16 km (8-10 miles) wide. It is one field and the farther south the wells, the more oil there is; the farther north, the more gas. The field is in a sandstone trap anticline with gas on top, then the oil, and finally water. In the period under discussion, this oil and gas producing field had wells varying in depth from 658.3 m (2,160 ft) to 1,798.3 m (5,900 ft). In the United States, American producers and processors had begun to market natural gas, such as that found along Sheep Creek and had begun to develop the technology needed to make the gas usable. William Maybury (1905) introduced a Bessemer engine to compress "wet" (containing quantities of liquid hydrocarbons) natural gas, thus forcing it to give up its liquids. Gas processing had been born, and when the automobile came upon the scene, the need to increase the supply of fuel from natural gas, either through "chilling" or "squeezing," became a priority. The result, known as "casinghead gas" or "naphtha," had previously been burned. This practice ended with the advent of the gasoiline engine; naphtha was now blended with heavier hydrocarbons and took the form of automobile fuel. The profit generated from its sale now excedded that from the maketing of natural gas. To enhance the recovery of naphtha, the process of compression became the norm. By 1913, however, the concept of "absorption" had been introduced whereby an absorption unit located in the field "absorbed" or stripped all the saturates (butanes, propanes, and pentanes) from the "sour" gas, which contained high levels of hydrogen sulphide and sulphur mercaptans. Natural gas, then, was a viable energy source by the time World War I arrived. In order to exploit the local reserves, various companies emerged, including the Calgary Petroleum Products Comapny. The CPP was formed in 1912 to exploit the Sheep Creek seepage and under the direction of Archibald W. Dingman, the president, the first well was drilled using the then current technology, the cable tool rig, a device which pounded its way through the earth's crust. CPP Well #1 (also known as Dingman #1 and later as Royalite #1) struck small quantaties of high grade oil on 14 May 1914. This first well started a boom in oil stocks which led to the discovery of more oil and natural gas. A portion of this natural gas was used to fire local steam boilers and the boilers which provided the cable tool rigs with their power. The balance of the gas was flared off, a practice which continued until the nearby Bow Island field experieince a drop in pressure and a consequent drop in the supply available for consumers in nearby Calgary. This event led to the arrival, in Turner Valley, of a veteran driller and entrepreneur, a French national by the name of Eugene Marius Coste. Coste's firm, the Canadian Western Natural Gas Company, bought the first three CPP wells and constructed both a compressor station and in 152.4 mm (6 ich) pipeline from Turner Valley to Okotoks in order to connect with its already established main line running from Bow Island to Calgary. On 31 December 1921, gas from Turner Valley began arriving in that City. THE EARLY YEARS OF GAS PROCESSING AT TURNER VALLEY Turner Valley had "sour" gas with the consequent "rotten egg" odour that comes from the presence of the high levels of hydrogen sulphide and sulphur mercaptans. These same substantial levels also make the gas highly unstable and unsafe when it flows from the wellhead. Moreover, hydrogen sulphide is a highly poisonous gas, fatal to humans, and under certain conditions it can produce spontaneous fires and explosions. These early attempts to rid our natural gas of its offensive odour and unstable properties turned into a major industry. Turner Valley was no exception. Dingman #1, produced from two to five varieties of sixty gravity oil per day and four million cubic feet of gas. The oil was used in cars and trucks in the crude form. Later a small skimming plant was erected and the product partially refined and marketed locally. The natural gas was piped to the drilling locations and used a fuels. In the course of World War 1, the naphtha (natural gasoline) was taken out of the flow by separators located at the wellhead, and primitive absorption plants. Almost immediately upon the discovery of large quantities of gas, CPP installed its compressor (1914). The compressor was the first used in Canada for the purpose of recovering natural gasoline, but hundreds were already in use in the United States. What is of significance is the fact that CPP supplemented the compression process with that of an absorption plant. There were few precedents elsewhere in the world at the time. A fire, which started when one of the two railway locomotive compressors blew up, levelled the American built absorption plant in 1920 and CPP, unable to cope with the cost of rebuilding, experienced financial difficulties. Imperial Oil, seeking an entry point into the new and potentially rich Turner Valley field, purchased the remains of the absorption plant in 1921, along with the company's wells, and formed the Royalite Oil Company Limited to operate both the production and processing sides of the field. In order to move the gas to consumers, compressors were needed, and in the fall of 1921 a compressor station was built consisting of six eighty horsepower Clark compressors using natural gas as fuel. The building of the 154.2 mm (six inch) pipeline to Okotoks, intended to join up to the Bow Island-Calgary line, marked the first commercial use of natural gas from the Turner Valley field other that which was used for drilling operations. As the number of consumers multiplied, the size of the compressor station doubled in 1923. Turner Valley's oil and gas boom was underway. THE PLANT SITE TODAY When it was decommissioned in May 1985, the Turner Valley gas plant consisted mainly of buildings and equipment which had been constructed in the period from about 1933 until 1952. There are only a few buildings of the period from 1912 until 1930. Each building and piece of equipment is linked together by the utility, process and control systems. These process units and their components underwent expansion and changes over times in response to market demands, new technologies and evolving processing methods. At this site, which included buildings and equipment constructed more than sixty years ago, the last major change worth noting took place in 1952 when the elemental sulphur extraction unit was added. Prior to the building of the sulphur plant, changes were meant to expand upon existing processes and facilities, as well as to add new processes such as the second distillation unit in the gasoline plant (1941) and the propane plant (1952). In the years following the construction of the sulphur recovery plant, changes at Turner Valley were intended to replace rather than extend. THE EVOLUTION OF GAS PROCESSING TECHNOLOGY AT THE TURNER VALLEY PLANT Samuel G. Coultis (1887-1983), a native of Forest, Ontario, was a graduate in pharmacy from Ann Arbour, Michigan. After working as a chemist in Calgary (1913) he later moved on to take part in the Dingman boom at Turner Valley. There he applied his knowledge of chemistry to the building of an oil refinery for the Alberta Southern Refining Company and it is said to have been one of the best in the area at the time, producing gasoline, kerosene, and two kinds of distillate before it closed in 1926. When Royalite opened he was hired by the company as its first employee. With John Gallagher, an expert in the art of firing steam boilers. Coultis set out to rebuild the ruined plant. On his own initiative Coultis modified the absorption technology in that the new plant had a horizontal absorber, which was simply a long pipe through which the raw natural gas was fed in from the field. Every few feet along the pipe were lean oil sprays, and as the oil spray hit the gas, the gas liquids were partially absorbed. The rich oil was then heated by steam and fed to a still where it was stripped of its natural gasoline and returned to the sprays. This 1912 absorption plant, designed by Samuel Coultis, represented a step up in technology in that absorption oil was sprayed into the gas in both horizontal and vertical absorbers. Coultis, less then a year into his new job, was also required to build a compressor station in order to permit Royalite to meet its contractual agreement with Canadian Western Natural Gas, supply Calgary with the gas it needed after the Bow Island field began to experience failing production. Coultis built the compressor station and Canadian Western the pipeline in less then two months and gas from Royalite #1, #2 and #3 (formerly Dingman #1, #2, #3) arrived in Calgary on time. The oil from Royalite #4 was welcomed after the well blew in during 1924, but the highly pressurized sour stream of gas was not. A gas several times more hazardous than carbon monoxide, it was different by far from the sweet gas of the earlier and shallower Dingman wells because #4 had penetrated the Mississippian Limestone Zone. At 640 grains of hydrogen sulphide per 100 cubic feet of gas, the hydrogen sulphide content had to be dealt with. Fortunately, Royalite could look to an important Canadian precedent in southern Ontario where gas from Tilbury field also contained hydrogen sulphide, but in smaller quantities. At Tilbury the processors used the only known gas purification technique, the one developed by the Koppers Company of Pittsburgh. It was meant for cleaning up coal gas. Their process, referred to as the "Seaboard process," was widely used by manufactured gas companies, but had never been attempted with natural gas. The Koppers of Seaboard process was applied by the Union Gas Company in its plant at Alma, Ontario to the Tibury gas, thus making it the first, not only to use this particular process, but also the first to purify gas at high pressure. A few months after the Alma plant went into production Coultis began to deal with the same problem, and in the end of his scrubbing operation (or "purification" plant as he sometimes referred to it), was set at 300 pounds of working pressure, double the pressure of any other plant operating on natural or artificial gas. It was, in fact, the largest plant of its kind in the world, and it could purify forty-five million cubic feet of gas per day, removing 97 percent of the sulphur. This Koppers or Seaboard process for the removal of hydrogen sulphide had been used for some time in the United States before it was introduced in Canada. However, the use of the process in Canada involved an important difference; it was Canadian processors who were the first to sweeten natural gas by this method, the Americans having used it on manufactured gas. Simple and economical, it was based on the absorption of hydrogen sulphide by a dilute solution of sodium carbonate with regeneration by air. The Seaboard scrubbing plant was constructed in the summer of 1925. It consisted of a steel tower containing six red wood grid packed scrubbers and two red wood grid packed actifiers, today referred to as "absorbers" or "contractors". The four actifiers were steel shells 4.5m (15ft.) by 16.45m (54ft.) filled with 4,500 square feet of baffling, over which the soda ash solution flowed against a current of air two and one-half times the volume of the gas being treated. Large Buffalo Forge Stoker Fans were used to create this powerful flow of air. The liberated hydrogen sulphide was vented from the stack, which was 0.9m (3ft) by 17.5m (123ft) and it went directly into the Turner Valley atmosphere. As more gas cap wells were drilled and more gas became available, the plant was progressively enlarged so that by 1928 it had a capacity of sixty million cubic feet of gas per day. In this early absorption plant, the gas was stripped of the gasoline, then heated to remove the ice and water, after which it entered a battery of twelve absorbers measuring 0.91m (36 in.) by 18.28m (60ft). Here it flowed counter current to a solution of NA2CO3 under 210,930 km2 (300psi) pressure over 1,800 square feet of baffling in each unit. The hydrogen sulphide in the gas was absorbed by the NA2CO3 to form NaHs. The sweet gas was drawn off overhead and the reacted solution was drawn off the bottom and fed to a reactivating tower where it passed downward counter to the above mentioned current of air. This regenerated the soda ash solution and liberated hydrogen sulphide. The problem with the Seaboard process was that while the fans were capable of venting the hydrogen sulphide up into the atmosphere, this 3 percent gas was heavier than air and on calm days it settled very quickly throughout the valley, bringing with it the rotten egg stench, burning the eyes of the inhabitants and causing them to choke. The Seaboard process continued to be used until 1952, even though a newer process had been introduced a decade before in response to wartime demands for more natural gas. From 1928 onward numerous wells were drilled in the gas cap and residue gas available exceeded for some years domestic demand, with the result that from 1931 over five million cubic feet of gas per day was being flared. As the rate of expansion of natural gas decreased, rates of recovery by separation process also decreased, but recoverable substances left in the tail gas increased. This led Royalite to construct Gasoline Plant No.1 with a capacity of seventy-five million cubic feet per day to extract natural gasoline from tail gas, the gas left over after the processing had been completed. At that time the recovery rate of gasoline from natural gas was low, and the scrubbed gas that could be marketed was, leaving the balance to be flared off. The expansion of the scrubbing and absorption process in 1928, with the addition of two more absorbers, another stack and solution pumps, went unchanged until 1935 when the demand for natural gas in Calgary increased. The changes which were made transformed the plant into an up-to-date processing facility. The wooden grids of the scrubbing towers were replaced by steel bubble cap trays, increasing capacity to seventy-five million cubic feet per day. All of the equipment for the plant was manufactured in Canada. The absorbers were made in St. Catharine's by the Foster Wheeler Company, while most of the other larger pieces came from the Montreal Locomotive Works. The electrical equipment was manufactured in Hamilton by Westinghouse. With the outbreak of war, it quickly became apparent that the scrubbing capacity of the plant would have to be further increased in order to supply the additional load due to the installation of wartime plants, barracks and airports, and a Calgary ammonia plant using natural gas as its source of hydrogen for the manufacture of explosives. On this occasion, however, the plant management did not add more Seaboard soda-ash units, instead, it made the decision to add a new process to sweeten the sour natural gas. Known as the Girbotol process (a Girdler Corporation patent invented by R.R. Bottoms), this sweetening unit was added in 1941 and Turner Valley became the site of another "first." Moreover, Turner Valley was to be the first plant to attempt to desulphurize and dehydrate sour gas in a one-step operation. (This attempt failed) The absorbing agent in this process was monoethanolamine (MEA). It was an improvement over the Seaboard process because it had a greater capacity for absorbing hydrogen sulphide and carbon dioxide, and it scrubbed the hydrogen sulphide out of the gas with an aqueous solution of menoethanolamine. In addition, it could be regenerated fairly quickly by steam heat, and as a result Gibotol and its various offspring were to dominate gas sweetening in western Canada into the early 1960s. The Girbotol unit has a normal capacity of fifty million cubic feet per day and an emergency capacity of seventy-two million cubic feet per day. Two of the bubble cap scrubbers in the Seaboard unit were converted for the use in the new Girbotol unit. The combined capacity of the two units was then in excess of over ninety million cubic feet. After some teething problems, the Girbotol unit went into operation in December 1942. The Allied War Supplies Corporation ammonia plant, south of Calgary, began operations in August 1941 and the chief supplier of its estimated daily requirement of four million cubic feet was the Turner Valley refinery owned by Royalite. By June 1943, daily requirements had increased to nine million cubic feet. The plant produced its first ammonia on 21 October 1941, a major industrial accomplishment because it was the first in the world ever to produce this compound from natural gas. In a very short time span its production was being sent to eastern Canada where it was turned into explosives, thereby elevating Turner Valley to a position of national importance as a supplier of this essential raw material. The war effort put other demands upon the Turner Valley oil field and gas processing plant. The operational needs of the Royal Canadian Air Force and the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan created an insatiable demand for high octane aviation fuel. Isobutane, the raw material for the production of alkylate, a blending agent for the manufacture of high octane gasoline, was present in Turner Valley's natural gas. Imperial Oil's Calgary refinery entered into an agreement with the Allied War Supplies Corporation to build an alkylation plant there. Additional equipment was installed at the four natural gasoline plants (Royalite operated two of the four plants) in Turner valley and two 5,000 barrel spherical tanks, known as "Horton's Spheres," were imported from the United States and assembled on the plant grounds. Here isobutane and natural gasoline/naphtha were stored under pressure before being sent as one product to Imperial's Calgary refinery, where they were separated by fractionation. This production of isobutane, which required the installation of butane splitters at the plant, was high technology for the time and it added to the importance of Turner Valley in the overall picture of wartime production. Years of exploitation of the gas cap led to a drop in the pressure and by 1938 it became clear that there was a need to build another compressor station. The first units were built at the main plant in 1938, while in 1944 a booster station was installed in the south-central part of the field. The main plant was upgraded again in 1942 and other changes were made to it in the years that followed. Out in the field, a series of smaller compressors were added to help push the gas towards the main plant in the town. Even before the end of the war and the discovery of significant amounts of oil and gas elsewhere in Alberta, the role of the plant at Turner Valley began to change. The old executive contracts between producers and consumers were ruled null and void by the provincial government and Royalite was forced to re-examine its organizational structure. It was during this period of transition that the last major change took place at the plant site. The first of these involved the building of the elemental sulphur plant, which brought to an end the venting of hydrogen sulphide to the atmosphere. Along with the Shell plant at Jumping Pound (1952), the Madison plant was the first to begin producing sulphur in Canada. The driving force behind its construction was the fact that raw sulphur, a strategic material used for defense production, was in short supply. The sulphur was to be scrubbed from the plant's vented hydrogen sulphide at the rate of thirty long tons per day and transported by truck to the railhead at Okotoks. The contract for the plant and its erection was given to Foster Wheller Limited of Toronto. Once in operation, it was a two-stage plant. Sulphur was first produced through the burning of hydrogen sulphide and oxygen in a reactor furnace at a temperature over 1600 degrees Fahrenheit, and was again produced later on in the process through unreacted hydrogen sulphide combining with sulphur dioxide (a product of the first burning), to form sulphur and water in the presence of a catalyst. The catalyst used was activated bauxite, in pellet form. The second stage took place at between 550 and 650 degrees Fahrenheit. The quantity of sulphur produced depended upon the volume of hydrogen sulphide available, which in turn depended upon the amount of natural gas required day by day by the consumer market in Calgary and vicinity. Thus, the production of sulphur was at its highest in the winter when natural gas was most in demand for domestic heating, and lowest in the summer. The sulphur came out of the plant in a liquid form and solidified in a corrugated iron holding tank, with new layers being added each day. When the tank was full of cooled, solidified, layered sulphur formed in various shapes dictated by the rate of cooling (rhombic, monoclinic and amorphous), the sides of the tank were removed and the sulphur broken up by a bulldozer for loading and shipment. In 1952, the same year that the sulphur plant went into operation. Royalite acquired the propane plant, a second significant development. It began as the brain child of James Barber, an American engineer who had worked in the Colorado oil fields. He arrived in Turner Valley in 1938 and in 1940 purchased an oilfield machine shop in nearby Longview which was in later years to become known as Barber Machinery, a major oilfield service company. Barber was aware that the Royalite flare contained mainly ethane and propane, and he decided to attempt to build an ethane extraction plant for the manufacture of ethylene, a much needed product in the expanding petrochemical industry. His plant would be a propane plant first and an ethane plant second; that is, the plant would split the flare gas into ethane and propane, with the propane being the first commodity to be marketed. The company Barber formed was Western Propane, and he constructed his plant half a mile up Sheep Creek from the Royalite/Madison plant. In order to deal with the hydrogen sulphide content Barber had to install a Girbitol sweetening unit, followed by the actual refrigeration-fractionation plant. There was no precedent for this type of plant anywhere; it was entirely new, because no Canadian firm had ever before attempted to extract natural gas products by refrigeration. Western Propane's deeply chilled propane reflux produced a product of 99 percent purity, probably because Barber was looking ahead to the time when he would need extremely pure ethane for the making of ethylene oxide. Although the plant managed to produce a thousand barrels of propane a day, the market of the late 1940s was not yet ready for Barber's product. In the end, Western Propane was sold to Royalite, and in 1952 the propane plant, and some of the former Western Propane personnel, moved down to the Royalite plant site. Within months the propane unit was integrated into the main plant operation and the liquid propane was being stored in the now familiar long, narrow tanks. Production was about 18,000 imperial gallons per day. The product, which contained better than 95 percent of propane by volume, was dry and contained no hydrogen sulphide. The only significant changes to take place after 1952 involved the closure of the original light and and steam plants in 1962 and the addition of the fractionation plant in 1975. The seventeen old locomotive-style boilers were replaced by three modern boilers and the construction of the fractionation plant permitted the separation of butane from condensate. Cosmetic changes in the form of the Joy inlet compressor and a new water pump house were meant as improvements and did not alter plant operations to any degree. Through the best efforts of the employed this old, and in some ways obsolete, collection of equipment was kept operational. Thus, when it closed in 1985, the plant was still operating equipment which had been installed as far back as the 1920s, just shortly after Royalite took over the former CPP site. "THINGS WERE JUST DONE" Although Turner Valley Plant #1 established a number of "firsts" for the Canadian gas processing industry, it cannot be cited as a centre for technological innovation. There was no new technology patented by Royalite in the years prior to its takeover by Dominion Securities, nor did successor companies lay claim to any new process, procedure or piece of equipment. The absorption process of the 1940s and 1950s was a known one and basic. The plant had new technology from time to time but it was standard technology already in use elsewhere and there was nothing new about the ideas. However, there were changes made to processes, procedures and equipment, for when it became obvious that there was a problem with production, it had to be rectified. When such a situation arose, said one former employee, "Things were just done." When the usual solutions failed, changes had to be made. Sometimes the changes to equipment were recorded on the appropriate blueprints by the designers, but often they were not. This was especially true when the cost of blueprint changes became burdensome because company revenues were declining. Important changes in chemical process or operating procedures usually warranted a comment in the Royalite minute books at the company headquarters in Calgary, as well as a line of two in the company magazine. Often, though, the less significant changes went unnoticed and were just accepted as normal operating routine by the plant operators and supervisory personnel. M.S. Worley, manager of Research and Development at the oilfield supply and engineering firm of Black, Sivalls and Bryson Inc., Oklahoma City, summarized his thoughts on change in the gas processing industry in 1961 when he said: "It is significant to note that most of the new developments that we read about today are much less ingenious discoveries than are the result of astute attention to well-known engineering principals coupled with hard work and perseverance." "New methods," he argued, "allow tailor made conditions and treating schemes and each process has its own niche where it will have particular advantages". This statement reflects accurately what took place at Turner Valley over the years; new methods were introduced from outside and modified to suit the local sour gas conditions. However, by the close of the 1950s, when gas plants were beginning to sprout up all over Alberta, Turner Valley was no longer the most up-to-date gas processing facility in the province. Further, a number of the new plants had been staffed by former Turner Valley engineers, supervisors and operators, men who built on their previous experience and were now in possession of the most up-to-date knowledge in the business. With the rapid expansion of the petroleum industry in the 1950s and 1960s, it was because of their involvement that Canadian technological innovation did begin to take place in the gas processing industry and their Canadian expertise became recognized worldwide. Unlike an oil refinery, which can have oil shipped to it from great distances and with relative ease, a gas processing plant often has a limited life span and it dependent upon natural gas from fields which are fairly close. Today, when a gas field is nearing depletion, the processing plant is usually shut down. Madison had to face this situation when the gas cap began to deplete and the feed stock went into decline. As the plant neared the end of its life, successive owners limited the amount of money they were willing to invest in it and instead continued to operate with equipment and processes which if not the most up-to-date, permitted them to meet the needs of their consumers. What is perhaps remarkable is that Royalite Plant #1, as it was known, continued to produce such high quality product until it closed. An example will serve to illustrate this point. Canadian Mining and Smelting's fertilizer plant required gas scrubbed clean of all sulphur or the firm's catalyst, platinum, would be "killed" during the manufacturing process. Madison had a reputation for being able to supply this exceptionally clean product. The real strength of the plant was not to be found in its processes nor its equipment, but in its employees. Management encouraged creative tinkering with a "Coin Your Idea" cash reward program, meant to solicit new ways of dealing with change in the areas of exploration, production, and processing and the gas plant. Everything from dewaxer knives for cleaning petroleum wax out of well casing, to a method of retipping odd bits and reamers, to wireline tools, to an automatic orifice (a modified flange) and a new type of welding rod received recognition by management. On another level were the changes which did not always receive recognition outside of the plant. Ken Ronaghan, an engineer, using a well-established principle of hydrostatics, developed a device to guage tanks from a distance. The apparatus fed directly into the office and eliminated the need to go to the tanks, especially in winter, to gauge their contents. At the Madison Laboratory, Alex Piercey, a chemical engineer, designed his own gas flow equipment and his own mercury vapour pump. The former measured the rate of flow and the latter created a vacuum to extract high pressure samples of gas. Both were based on well-known scientific principals, both were built at the plant's machine shop, but neither were ever patented. Piercy also modified, for Turner Valley conditions, techniques he had learned in Tulsa, on course at the University of Oklahoma, on caonate water content. Caonate water was the water left inside of cores taken from within the earth. It was also Piercey who developed equipment for taking large core samples but it, too, was never patented. Operating procedures were also altered in the face of the day-to-day realities of profit and loss. In the summer, scrubbed gas which was not in demand, was pumped first down Royalite #3 and then down the other wells in the Turner Valley area, and even as far away as Bow Island. It was kept there until the weather changed and demand increased again, at which time it was retrieved and shipped by Valley Pipeline. It was not believed to be a procedure unique to Turner Valley, nor was the idea of connecting anodic posts to pipelines. Royalite welders had observed early on that it became necessary to patch the holes in the pipelines with increasing frequency and company engineers concluded that they were being created by electronic corrosion. The anode post was made of lead and was about four feet long with a wire attached to the pipeline buried beneath. This grounding, it was found, prevented electrolysis and ended the problem of that particular type of pipeline corrosion. In the area of compressor maintenance, the mechanics and operators assigned to them became concerned at the level of wear and began to search for a replacement for the petroleum-base oil. They found it in an old reliable commodity, castor oil, and switched to using it instead, cutting down on maintenance costs and breakdowns. Corrosion, created by salt water and hydrogen sulphide, was a constant challenge. Compressor engines which used natural gas as their source of power were early victims. Shortly after the Girbotol process was introduced, the plant found itself faced with hydrogen embrittlement, or hydrogen cracking. Pipes, valves, gauges, compressor engines, heat exchangers and other components began corroding. The problem was partly solved by separating MEA and diethylene glycol - the desulphurizing and dehydrating phases - so that the sweetening changed from a one-step operation to a two-step operation. Oconal was added to prevent the foam bubbles which played such an important role in corrosion. Constant inspection of components, inside and out, and experimentation with various types of protective coating, such as gunite in the scrubbing towers, became the norm. Another corrosion problem was located within the plant's cooling water system. The water meant to cool various units became warm, and as a result it was a medium for algal and fungal growth, causing buildup and fouling within lines and controls. There was a constant experimenting with different chemical additives in an attempt to try to keep this problem under control. The ability to deal effectively with the many design and maintenance challenges presented by a gas processing plant was taxed further by the age and type of equipment that began arriving at the site from the 1920s onward. The first equipment Royalite installed at Turner Valley in the mid 1920s came from a closed International Petroleum (an Imperial subsidiary) oil refinery in Peru. Some of the pieces of equipment, such as the big lean oil circulation pump and the absorbers, may have been built between 1910 and 1920. Riveted pressure vessels, such as gasoline absorbers in the gasoline plant, are from the same location and era, and the large pumps which drove the Seaboard system were from Peru as well. Originally designed as compressors, they were converted to pumps after they arrived in Canada. The light plant also originated in Peru, and it continued to generate power for the plant use with three Cooper Bessemer Hope engines (called "Faith," "Hope," and "Charity") until a condensing steam turbine alternator was installed with the new steam plant in the 1960s. With this first batch of equipment came some of the Canadians who had worked at the International Petroleum plant, and they assisted with its reassembly when it reached Turner Valley. In later years, replacement equipment and equipment designed destined to be part of an expansion was sometimes obtained secondhand through Imperial Oil or one of its other subsidiaries. Some of the equipment had unusual origins: one informant claimed that the MEA rerun still had functioned first as a fresh water reclaimer on a battleship! In later years, and in keeping with the early tradition of "scrounging" equipment wherever it could, Royalite acquired used controls of a superior quality to install on its own scrubbing and gasoline plant after a 1953 explosion and fire destroyed much of the nearby Purity 99 refinery. Some of the vessels, pipes and controls had murky pasts. Those vessels destined to work at higher pressures had to be registered with the Province of Alberta because of the risk of explosion and fire. This registration practice had been instituted when steam was king and when the petroleum industry expanded the same general principals applied to production and processing operations. When the sulphur plant was completed and operating, the field manager, Thomas Trotter, carried out the usual procedures required by the chief inspector of boilers for the province and submitted the specifications for each pressure vessel, as was the legal requirements under the Unfired Pressure Vessels Code. Each vessel in question had a history of its own, but some of the equipment destined for service in the plant had arrived there without documentation and the field manager had to provide it with an identity. One such case involved a "suction accumulator." The field manager admitted that the records of the origins of the vessel were "not clear"; it thought that the piece had been acquired in 1931 or 1932, probably from one of the small companies in the area which had gone out of business. It had been used most recently by Valley Pipe Line as a surge tank and when Madison acquired it for the sulphur plant it had no name plate, registration stamps, or any other identification, leading him to conclude that it had never been used as a pressure vessel in Alberta. He "assumed" that "for design calculation purposes the material in the shell and heads is plate carbon steel SA-285 grade A, ASTM-A-283-46T Grade A or equal, with a specific minimum tensile strength of 45,000lbs/sq.in". "The vessel," he continued, "appeared to be in good condition, and there (was) little evidence of corrosion." He concluded that it would be suitable for its role as a "suction accumulator" and recommended its acceptance as a part of the sulphur plant's operation because from: "the shell and head thickness, riveting seams, and attachment of internal manhole, it appears obvious that the vessel was manufactured for a working pressure in excess of 200 lbs/sp. in." There is nothing to indicate that the expansion was rejected or that the vessel was ever removed from the sulphur plant. One of the last additions to the site, the elemental sulphur plant, is an interesting study in how the different departments within the main plant worked together with the contractor to install a new process. The construction of the plant was a departure for Royalite, as Imperial Oil had not been in the chemical business. However, Imperial had sold its interests in Royalite to Dominion Securities and then the Bronfman group. The Bronfmans, aware that the federal government wanted to be assured of a domestic supply of the element, worked with Ottawa and Royalite management to have the plant designed and constructed. Before either phase took place, a pilot project was carried out at the plant site under Bud Pearson, a supervisor and Ken Ronaghan, who was about to write his master's thesis on the outcome. Out behind the boiler house Pearson and Ronaghan used a primitive process to mimic what the plant would later do and after some experimenting produced a small amount of elemental sulphur, proving that large-scale production was feasible. Royalite's Engineering and Construction Department lent Donald D. Dunbar, a civil engineer, to the Madison Natural Gas Company to oversee the design and construction of the sulphur plant. Dunbar had already designed the eighty foot by ten foot venting stacks which, by using huge fans, drove the acid gas into the atmosphere. A man of considerable talent, he was intimately familiar with the processes involved, and with the various vessels, controls, valves, and tanks that were required for the operation. The legacy of Dunbar's efforts may be seen in a fascinating collection of thirty-six hand-drawn sketches depicting each piece of equipment involved in each stage of the sulphur recovery operation. These sketches were later used by Foster Wheeler of St. Catharines, Ontario to draft the blueprints which were used by the manufacturers when they built many of the vessels and other pieces of operating equipment. When the equipment built outside of Turner Valley arrived, all units in the plant lent personnel to assist with the assembly. Key to the assembling of the new unit were Dunbar and Pearson, the latter being a man of exceptional ability who could remember where every line was laid in the plant. Within a very short time the plant was up and running, and after the teething problems, such as optimum operating temperatures, were worked out it began producing sulphur for tire and pulp and paper plants, spreading on irrigated land for reclamation and industry in Japan. "THEY COULD MAKE ALMOST ANYTHING" Until the discovery of oil at Leduc in 1947, the Turner Valley field dominated the petroleum scene in Alberta and Royalite was the most influential corporate body there. Royalite always operating in the shadow of Imperial Oil, attempted to be a self-sufficient company able to take car of most of its own needs. It was also company with a number of talented employees and management was far-sighted enough to allow them a measure of leeway in putting into action some of their ideas for improving the efficiency of equipment and processes. In this regard, the operation of the Royalite machine shop, which played a central part in the day-to-day operations of not just the gas plant, but exploration (drilling) in the Turner Valley area, and production, was to play an important role until it was closed in the early 1950s. At that time, the work once done in Turner Valley was shipped out to Calgary where Barber Machinery took responsibility for it, thereby putting to an end a twenty-five year old tradition of skilled workmanship. The origins of the machine shop were not Canadian; in 1929 an entire machine shop capable of turning out almost any type of metal construction and fabrication work was transported from Casper, Wyoming to Turner Valley. Here it became the nucleus of Royalite's Forge and Machine Shop. The first shop foreman, Ronald Wismer, had been an oil worker in Peru, thus keeping alive the Peru-Turner Valley connection. Initially, the shop's activities centered mainly on Royalite's drilling program; its function was to keep the drilling rigs operating through the fabrication of special fittings and the carrying out of necessary repairs to rig equipment. The largest lathes were meant for working on rotary drilling equipment and tool joints, for example, while the pipe cutting and threading machine was meant to handle well casings of all sizes. However, as drilling operations fell off these machines were utilized on other types of work. Changes to them also allowed the Royalite shop to fabricate parts for the draw works on the rotary rigs and to grind sheaves for travelling and crown block on the derricks. Specialized tools were made at the machine shop, such as "fishing tools" for down hole problems and tools for working on the huge compressors at the plant. All pipe bends necessary to the operation of the gas plant, together with all welded vessels used there, were made in the shop. During World War II, when it became impossible to buy new valves, repairs to them were taken over by machine shop personnel. When the plant was expanded to permit the manufacture of an ingredient for aviation fuel, the shop became responsible for the fabrication of the majority of fittings, such as flanges and bolts, and as a result of the plant expansion the amount of isobutane necessary for the war effort was increased. Machine shop personnel worked closely with employees from exploration, production and processing and they possessed the skill and knowledge that all good artisans have. As one former operator said: "They could make almost anything." When one of the supervisory personnel had an idea for improving the operation of a piece of equipment the machine shop personnel threw themselves into making it become a reality. When an engineer or a laboratory chemist had an idea for a new way of improving the operation of a phase of the Seaboard or some other process, or needed a different type of testing equipment built, the machinists put their heads together and tried to find a way to make it. In keeping with the Royalite tradition of making do with what was at hand, the machine shop fabricated everything it could for use by the exploration, production, processing and shipping sides of the company's operation and repaired everything from sawmill instruments to the draw works on drilling rigs. Only the absence of a rolling mill prevented the machinists from rolling steel, a basic necessity if vessels were to be fabricated on site. When steel was short during World War II, the shop got the good steel it needed by taking the preserved chisel-shaped cable tool bits, which ranged in size from six inches to twenty-four inches in diameter, weighed up two tons and stood up to eight feet high and melted them down. This high-tempered, solid steel would not otherwise have been available to the company. This ability to adapt to change and to tinker creatively resulted in the machine shop winning at least five "Coin You Ideas" awards prior to its closure. THE MADISON LABORATORY Another vital part of the Royalite Turner Valley operation was the Madison Laboratory. It was located at the Royalite Oil Company field headquarters in Turner Valley and it served the needs of exploration, production and processing. The laboratory was staffed by a highly trained and skilled staff of chemical engineers and technicians who performed a variety of tasks for the geological and production departments along with the routine work connected with the normal operations of the absorption gasoline and gas scrubbing plants. Here, also, special experiments of a complex nature were conducted whenever the need arose. The laboratory was created in the early twenties by Samuel Coultis, who by the 1950s was the Vice-President and General Manager of Imperial Pipe Line Company in Edmonton. The gas scrubbing plant, built in 1925, required the services of a laboratory and until 1932 it provided tests for hydrogen sulphide, gas gravities and control tests on naphtha being extracted from the gas cap wells, as well as tests relating to the strength of the solutions. Distillation tests on oil were done in the laboratory and it was also responsible for keeping production figures. With the construction in 1933 of the Royalite natural gasoline plant #1 the work of the laboratory was broadened to include precise analysis of gas, gasoline and absorption oils. By 1938 it was dealing with the effects of acidizing of oil wells in the area; there was a need to analyze spent acids and to check the salt water content of the crude oil. The calcium and magnesium chlorides, along with the sulphur in the cruse, corroded the plant's equipment until satisfactory field control measures were devised as a result of surveys made by the laboratory staff. This had only just been dealt with when the corrosion problems arising out of the operation of the new Gibrotol unit appeared in 1942. As the demand for aviation fuel rose so did the demand for isobutane and new equipment was acquired which allowed the laboratory staff to test the efficiency of the gasoline plant while it worked at full capacity. The end of the Second World War resulted in a shift of focus for the Madison Laboratory. More emphasis was placed on examining core, gas and water samples from wells being drilled by both Royalite and Imperial Oil. This increased oil and gas activity resulted in an expansion of facilities (1947) and the addition of core analysis and reservoir sample analysis, as well as equipment for testing soil for corrosive properties in those locations where gas-gathering pipeline systems were being installed. All laboratory work for the Imperial Oil Producing Department was carried out by the Madison Laboratory until 1948, when Royalite was separated from Imperial Oil. Madison did the first analysis of gas at Leduc and the first analysis for bottom hole samples in that field. Imperial Oil went on to develop its own engineering laboratory (1949) and the Madison Laboratory continued to service Royalite and other smaller firms which lacked facilities. It continued to operate, though at a reduced service level, until the plant closed. The Madison Laboratory was a control and service laboratory which carried out a wide range of tests for the exploration, production and processing side of Royalite. The Madison Laboratory was probably the first in Canada to do exhaustive core testing on large diamond cores and much of the equipment used by Imperial Oil in its laboratory after 1949 and in commercial core laboratories is based on equipment first developed at Turner Valley and manufactured in the machine shop there. In the gas plant, the annual steel inspection was the responsibility of the laboratory staff and it attempted to diagnose the cause of metal failure and to arrive at a cure of protective measured. Early, and crude, environmental test were also begun by the laboratory to monitor monthly, through a series of small stations, the level of hydrogen sulphide in the air (it was considered safe) and the purity (from 1938) of the water in Sheep Creek (it was considered less safe). In addition, a wide range of solutions and chemical processes used at the plant were monitored by the laboratory, as were the water systems, compression systems and the heat exchangers. These monitoring techniques were later employed elsewhere in gas plants across western Canada. TURNER VALLEY AS A CENTRE OF THE DIFFUSION OF EXPERTISE The Turner Valley oil and gas field trained a number of skilled exploration, production and processing personnel and their expertise was in demand in the fields which developed after World War II. Samuel Coultis and many who followed after him went to work on the drill rigs, at the (tank) battery sites, in the petroleum refineries and gas plants and on the pipelines scattered across western Canada and even abroad. Until the mid -1940s Royalite had a pool of expertise in oil and gas which was unmatched elsewhere in Canada. The sale of Royalite by Imperial Oil, after the discovery of oil at Leduc, began a change for the company which was to have an impact on Turner Valley operations and the gas plant in particular. At the Madison Laboratory, four of the nucleus of seven engineers left Royalite to take up employment with Imperial Oil and to set up the new research laboratory. Others from production joined Imperial Oil at Leduc, Devon and Redwater. Royalite's own expansion into the Redwater field resulted in the transfer of some Turner Valley production personnel and some gas plant personnel who changed occupations and went northward as well. Others from the gas plant switched over to the Royalite oil refinery at Kamloops, British Columbia Pipe Line Company. When British American purchased the gas plant some of the workers were transferred out to the company's new gas processing operations at such places at Nevis and Rimbey. "Prime trained operators, managers and management people" is how these people were described by one chemical engineer and former Turner Valley gas plant manager. Some of the operators and technicians came to the gas plant with little or no experience and learned their skills on the job. Jim McInnis, the plant's instrument technician, had been a grain buyer. Others had been farmhands, mechanics or laborers. Royalite gave the operators the opportunity to move from unit to unit within the plant and in this way they could learn how the various units were interconnected. Among those educated at universities, it was the technical engineers who came to Royalite, Madison and Valley Pipe Line, for they had acquired the baseline technology necessary to support gas processing. A few, like Geoff Andrews and Ken Ronaghan, left the armed forces after World War II, entered university and returned after graduation to work at the plant before moving on to other positions with Imperial Oil. Jim Harvie began as an engineer in the plant and later went on to occupy a senior management position with Gulf Oil. All of these employed took their collective Turner Valley experience with them wherever they went, and by the time the plant closed Turner Valley had trained people for all companies and for oil and gas fields in Canada and elsewhere. CONCLUSION Turner Valley was the location at which Canada, the first nation which found itself compelled to treat sizable quantities of natural gas containing high percentages of hydrogen sulphide, entered the natural gas processing industry on a large scale. It was at the original Royalite Plant #1 that Canadians were introduced to the technology of the day and as it changed or was modified they applied it whatever capacity seemed appropriate at the time. It was in this way that the first compressor arrived in Canada to deal with wet gas and that Samuel Coultis was able to innovate with his first absorption plant. From this initial plant came a series of Canadian "firsts" in natural gas processing. The Turner Valley plant also demonstrates the extent to which local creative tinkering can keep aging equipment functioning and producing a profit for its owners past what might today be considered to be the end of its productive life. This facility, and the wells supporting it, were early financial engines in the petroleum industry in Canada, supplying as they did some of the funding required to finance the exploration and production in other parts of Canada and overseas. Last of all, the plant occupies a significant position in the history of gas processing technology because of its importance in training Canadians for future work in exploration, production and processing, not just in Alberta, but also in western Canada and elsewhere in the world. NOTE This article is part of an on going research project on the Turner Valley Gas Plant which is being planned in conjunction with Parks Canada, National Historic Sites, and the Historic Sites Services of Alberta Community Development. From, Historic Turner Valley, Cradle of Westen Canada's Oil and Gas Industry, pg 113-131