For NGLs to become a major business, however, took the efforts of large and imaginative players, plus the development of a much larger gas supply from which to extract these light hydrocarbons.
And though its oil and gas activity was concentrated in the US southwest and in western Canada, its marketing presence was strongest in middle America.
Improvement of the absorption medium and contact between the gas and the oil made for substantially higher rates of liquids recovery.
Gas and Oil Products Ltd. built a similar plant at Hartell in 1934 and British American (BA) opened one at Longview in 1936.
The other two plants flared or burned off most of their residue gas until the board ruled that only wells connected to a market could be produced, stopping the practice.
As the Turner Valley story illustrates, the extraction of natural gas liquids goes back to the industry's early years.
However, the development of partnerships between the large American oil company Amoco and the young, dynamic Dome Petroleum to create sophisticated liquids infrastructure in Western Canada.
Headquartered in Calgary, Amoco Canada’s liquids marketing group had a great deal of independence in the early years.
At about the same time, Dome developed a solution gas gathering business based on oilfields around Steelman, Saskatchewan.
Separated from a gas stream, NGLs are an undifferentiated batch of light hydrocarbons — ethane, propane, butane and condensate.
Fractionation towers separate a stream of mixed NGL feedstock into specification-grade ethane, propane, butane and condensate products.
Originally, Hudson’s Bay Oil and Gas Company had applied to construct, operate and own that plant.
Amoco and British American intervened at an Oil and Gas Conservation Board hearing with a proposal that would give all operators a share of the plant.
Working with Chicago, Amoco Canada began developing a marketing strategy, a critical part of which would be the delivery system.
Recycling plants such as those at Kaybob, West Whitecourt and Crossfield produced liquids-rich gas from "retrograde condensation" reservoirs.
Most of these plants were built in the days of 16 cent (per 1000 cubic feet) long-term contracts from TransCanada PipeLine when the National Energy Board required 25 years of reserves in the ground to gain an export permit (from Canada).
What drove the economics of this procedure was not gas production, but the liquids that could be recovered and sold as part of the crude mix.
This arrangement was the beginning of a series of liquids-related deals that would soon see Amoco and Dome partnering to become the largest players in Canada’s NGL business.
At the end of the ‘60s, Alberta and Southern Gas Company began building a larger plant at Cochrane, a small town just west of Calgary.
Liquids fetch a higher price (relative to their energy or BTU content) because they have uses other than firing furnaces — as gasoline additives and petrochemical feedstocks, for example.
Using Fort Saskatchewan as a staging point, they batched natural gas liquids through Interprovincial’s oil pipeline to Sarnia.
Liquefied petroleum gases (or LPGs, another name for propane and butane) have to be contained well above atmospheric pressure to remain in liquid form.
Caverns washed into those formations were used to receive NGL from IPL, and to store specification grade products to meet seasonal demand.
From the Sarnia plant, Amoco and Dome could meet regional requirements for liquids by rail, water and road links to central Canada and the US Midwest.
It grew quickly, however: salt storage caverns were soon added, and a 1974 expansion of the fractionation plant increased NGL processing capacity to nearly 50,000 barrels per day (7,900 m3/d).
As importantly, it made sense to extract liquids before sending the dry gas that remained - unadulterated methane - into the export market.
Pacific Petroleums (acquired by Petro-Canada) had already built a straddle plant at Empress to extract liquids, so Dome’s idea was not new.
Those facilities enabled Dome to inject additional liquids into the batches that were flowing from Fort Saskatchewan through Interprovincial Pipeline.
This plan was essentially a $1.5 billion blueprint for the creation of a petrochemicals business in Alberta based on natural gas liquids, especially ethane.
In addition, one leg of the AEGS pipeline would connect Empress, which would soon become the largest gas processing centre in the world.