Canadian Beginnings

The Royal Dutch/Shell Group incorporated its Canadian business in 1911 with a capital of only $50,000 (or about $1 million in today’s dollars.)

The company opened its Longue Pointe Bunkering Plant in Montréal with just six employees a few weeks later. This was just four years after the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company and the "Shell" Transport and Trading Company had merged in the international marketplace.

Initially headquartered in a tiny office on the corner of St. Catherine and Peel Streets in Montréal, the Shell Company of Canada served a market in which there were only 34,000 motor vehicles registered in the entire country, consuming less than five million gallons (22 million litres) of gasoline per year. The only other major markets for petroleum products at the time were kerosene for lighting and diesel fuel for ships.

In 1914, the British Admiralty took over Shell's Longue Pointe Refinery to use as a fueling station for ships. Since Longue Pointe was the company's only operation in Canada, for seven long years it found itself twiddling its corporate thumbs with nothing to do, while competitors heavily exploited the wartime boom in the oil industry.

When the Admiralty finally returned Longue Pointe to Shell in 1921, the company re-entered a changed market, where its competitors had a major head start. Companies like the British American Oil Co. (which would one day become Gulf, and then part of Petro-Canada), McColl-Frontenac (later to become Texaco, and eventually part of Esso in Canada) and Sun Oil were the market leaders.

In 1925, Ed Callan, just 21 years old, started work at Shell's first Canadian service station, on the corner of Elmhurst and Sherbrooke St. West in Montréal. His unique uniform - leather leggings and breeches - with blue shirt and a black leather bow tie, was the standard of the day. The wholesale price of gasoline in Montréal at the time was 22 cents a gallon -- just under five cents a litre.

In the 1920s, civic regulations in Toronto stipulated that a service station on a corner lot must cost not LESS than $7,500. Shell's standard station design at the time was an inexpensive box-like structure with a canopy, and not much else. Meeting that regulation was a bit of a problem, solved by facing the building with marble and stone, to create a rather memorable and expensive edifice.

Shell continued to expand its Canadian operations, moving its corporate headquarters from Montréal to Toronto in 1930 and adding a number of new stations to its network.

Royal Dutch/Shell was also busy in Western Canada, where it established a bulk fuel plant near Vancouver. By 1928, Shell had a network of 19 service stations in B.C., and in 1929, Shell Oil Co. of B.C. was incorporated.

In 1932 the company opened the Shellburn Refinery in B.C., with an initial capacity of 3,500 barrels a day. A year later the state-of-the-art Montréal East Refinery came on stream, producing 5,000 barrels a day.

As early as 1932, Shell began offering its larger customers a special discount card, which by about 1939 had become a full-fledged credit card. (The concept of "paying with plastic" didn't come for a few more years; those early cards were made of flimsy cardboard and often didn't even have expiry dates.)

In 1939, exploration began in Western Canada, although it was the Shell Oil Co. of New York rather than Shell Canada that opened an exploration office in Calgary and started exploring the west.

During the Second World War, Shell Canada was vitally involved in wartime activities, providing oil to Britain via British and Canadian tankers.

Exploration continued during the war years and in 1944, Shell discovered a major natural gas field at Jumping Pound in Alberta. Many other major discoveries followed.

Shell Canada became a fully-integrated petroleum company in 1957 when it bought out all the Canadian exploration and production properties of U.S.-based Shell Oil Co., and continued to expand its retail activities at the same time.

In 1961, Shell purchased North Star Oil Ltd., which had 1,000 service stations, 350 bulk plants and a refinery in St. Boniface, Man. A year later, it bought out the assets of Canadian Oil (White Rose), which included 2,900 retail outlets, refineries in Sarnia, Ont. and Bowden, Alta., as well as oil and gas properties.

The name of this rapidly-growing company was officially changed to Shell Canada Limited in 1963, a year after Shell shares were offered publicly for the first time. Through the 1960s and 1970s, Shell Canada continued to grow, to explore for petroleum resources in a number of Canadian locations, and to introduce new technologies and products to the Canadian marketplace.

When Shell’s $1.4 billion state-of-the-art Scotford Refinery opened near Edmonton in 1984, it became the first refinery in the world to refine only synthetic crude oil extracted from the massive Alberta oil sands deposits. In 1984, the company moved its corporate headquarters to Calgary from Toronto.

In 1986, Shell Canada discovered the Caroline natural gas field, the largest find in Western Canada in 25 years. The company also launched the Formula Shell Gold, Silver and Bronze gasolines, the world’s first gasolines with an ignition spark enhancer ingredient coupled with one of the best detergents available.

In 1987, Shell opened brought out its toll-free telephone customer service centre, Shell Helps.

In 1988, as an Olympic Winter Games sponsor, Shell produced a popular series of 10 lapel pins, a Winter Olympics fact book, a daily Olympic Report newspaper and a number of other promotional items.

Shell became the first Canadian company to offer a completely lead-free gasoline product line more than a year before the government’s deadline. That switch, initiated in October 1989, was made possible by the leading-edge technology of Formula Shell’s spark enhancer, introduced in 1986.

Believing that it will take the ideas and commitments of all Canadians to find solutions to the country’s environmental dilemmas, Shell created the Shell Environmental Fund in 1990. The fund makes grants to community-driven, grass-roots, action-oriented environmental projects.

The discovery of the Caroline field led to the commissioning of the Caroline Complex in 1992. That same year, the Company donated 8,900 hectares of land in British Columbia to the Nature Conservancy of Canada. This donation was the largest private land donation in Canadian history and the property became the Mount Broadwood Heritage Conservation site.

Also in 1992, the Company became a pillar sponsor of the AIR MILES® Reward Miles program.

In 1993 Shell Canada acquired Canadian Turbo Inc. and Payless Gas Company Ltd. including 350 retail outlets, 29 bulk agencies and 40 cardlock facilities.

The late 1990s were a time of change for Shell Canada. In 1996, the Company divested its chemicals business to Shell International Chemicals and in 1999 sold its conventional crude oil business in the Plains area of Western Canada to Apache Canada. That year the first gas flowed from the Sable Offshore Energy Project located offshore Nova Scotia. Shell Canada has a 31.3 per cent interest in the project.

On the retail side, with the introduction of <em>easy</em>PAY, Shell became the first Canadian oil company using a radio chip embedded in a key tag to enable customers to simply drive up to the pumps, present their key chain tag to the pump face for automatic credit authorization, fill up and drive away. Probably the most significant event of 1999 was the announcement of the decision to build a joint-venture oil sands project. Called the Athabasca Oil Sands Project (AOSP) , the venture included the Muskeg River Mine in the Athabasca region of northern Alberta and the Scotford Upgrader near Edmonton.

By 2002, the mine produced its first bitumen and Shell’s Sarnia and Montreal East refineries completed construction of new gasoline hydrotreaters for the production of ultra-low-sulphur gasoline. That year the company proudly became the first oil and gas company in Canada to have all its key operating facilities registered to ISO 14001, an international environmental standard.

In June 2003, the AOSP was officially opened and began fully integrated operations at the mine and upgrader.

In 2004, Shell Canada announced a major natural gas discovery at Tay River in central Alberta.

In 2005, the Company celebrated the AOSP’s achievement of 100 million barrels of bitumen production after just over two years of operation, launched a new premium gasoline called V-Power and brought the Tay River gas discovery into production