WI Larger Canadian Oil Fields discovered sooner.

A simple premises what if Canada's larger oil fields such as the Leluc oil field discovered in 1947 and the Pembina discovered in 1953 were discovered sooner.

Obviously the nations oil production will peak sooner but could a discover of an oil field like the Pembina Canadas largest before the Great depression have allowed it to have gone through the Depression easier.
 
For that you need people to be spooked by peak oil 50 years ago

The simple answer is, folks would have to have been really spooked by peak oil in the 1950's to explore for and exploit fields like the Athabascan tar sands which need titanic amounts of water, heat energy, and additives to flush the oil out of the shale, not to mention treating of all that wastewater contaminated with heavy metals, tar sludge, and said additives- solvents and surfactants to get those heavy tar-like fractions to flow up the pipe.

If you're an oilman, you prefer light sweet crude that doesn't require so much input to obtain useful fractions of petroleum. In the 1950's world population was at 2 billion and global demand about a tenth of current demand.
Nobody anticipated the exponential growth of population and the demand for energy per capita spiking when China and India (2.4 billion people out of 7 billion people) got a lot more prosperous and thus demand more energy from 1990-present.

Sure, new technologies (catalytic cracking allowed refiners to use heavier grades of oil; hydraulic fracturing and other injection-well technologies allowed operators to milk a lot more from "played-out" oil and gas fields) expanded the scope of what fields could still produce and what refiners could do with poorer grades of oil.

My thought is, panic sets in during the 1970's when ANY North American oil field becomes worth developing and accelerated OTL search for alternative oil fields and extraction tech to avoid any more attempts by OPEC to jack up Western economies.
 
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