Oil in Saskatchewan

Canada's fastest-growing town this week is the Saskatchewan farm hamlet of Smiley, 300 miles northwest of Regina. Smiley's meager population has more than tripled, from 105 to 350, in the past four months. Roomers are bedded down on cots in the corridors of the town's only hotel. New streets have been laid out, lined with tar-paper shacks and auto trailers. A third classroom will be opened this week for the winter term in the Smiley schoolhouse.

Smiley's sudden surge is the result of an oil strike last September some 2,300 ft. below the surface of the surrounding wheatfields. In a geologic layer of Viking sand, drillers for Imperial Oil Ltd. struck a pool of high-quality light oil, the best yet found in Saskatchewan. Since then, 30 producing wells have been drilled, and new ones are coming in at the rate of two a week. Some 15,400 acres of Smiley wheatland have been classified as a proven field, capable of accommodating 385 producing wells.

The Smiley discovery is the biggest event in a year of high-pressure oil exploration all over Saskatchewan. Until last year, the province had run a poor second to neighboring Alberta in oil exploration. Through most of 1953, however, while Alberta drilling dropped 3%, Saskatchewan's increased almost 100%, with some 75 Canadian and U.S. companies taking part. At year's end there were 14 established oilfields in the province, with about 450 operating wells.

Most other Saskatchewan wells yield heavy black crude, rather than the lighter, and more valuable oil produced in Alberta. The Smiley strike, yielding a 32-to-36DEG-gravity light oil, has given Saskatchewan oilmen reason to hope that, in quality as well as quantity, their wells may some day match Alberta's best. Oil companies have already budgeted a record $40 million for development in 1954.

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