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Since its first commercial exploitation in the 1850s, petroleum has become the major energy source of Canada and the industrial world.

Research has always been the backbone of the petroleum industry. Bringing crude oil, bitumen or natural gas to the surface presents major technological problems and, once recovered, there is little use for the resource in its raw state.

Tidal energy is a largely untapped, renewable energy source based largely on lunar gravitation. While the potential of tidal hydroelectricity has long been recognized, compared to river dams, tidal power projects are expensive because massive structures must be built in difficult saltwater environments.

Wind energy is energy obtained from moving air. The motion results from the heating and cooling of the Earth; thus, wind energy is an indirect form of solar energy.

Ontario Hydro was a Crown corporation owned by the Ontario government until it was privatized in 1999.

AOSTRA was merged into the Provincial Ministry of Energy's Oil Sands and Research Division in 1994. The corporation was dissolved in 2000 and its assets and liabilities were vested in the Alberta Science and Research Authority.

Motor vehicle registration figures appear for the first time in The Canada Year Book for 1916-17. It was in this year that the Year Book accorded motor vehicles a new status as the most important means of transportation in Canada.

Semiconductors, often called integrated circuits, chips or microchips, are essential components of all computers and are used in a wide variety of other devices including telecommunications equipment, consumer electronics, home appliances, and even automobiles.

Petroleum industries find, produce, process, transport, refine and market petroleum commodities.

Oilseed Crops are grown primarily for the oil contained in the seeds. The oil content of small grains (eg, wheat) is only 1-2%; that of oilseeds ranges from about 20% for soybeans to over 40% for sunflowers and rapeseed (canola).

NOVA Corporation was a Canadian energy company based in Calgary. Originally known as the Alberta Gas Trunk Line Company Ltd., it was established in 1954 to build, own and operate Alberta’s natural gas gathering and transmission facilities. In 1998, NOVA merged with TransCanada (now TC Energy), creating the fourth largest gas pipeline company in North America.

The $7.9 billion Northern Gateway project was a pipeline proposal that Enbridge put forward in 2008. Northern Gateway would have carried diluted bitumen (“dilbit”) about 1,170 km from Bruderheim, Alberta to a terminal on the Pacific Ocean at Kitimat, British Columbia. Enbridge claimed that the project would create $1.2 billion in tax revenue for BC, as well as 560 jobs. The Federal Court of Appeal overturned the pipeline’s approval in 2016. That same year, the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rejected the project.

People did not start drilling for buried petroleum until the middle of the 19th century, though its existence had been known for centuries.

Natural gas ranks among the fastest-growing energy sources in Canada and is seen by many in the energy industry as a game-changer, a comparatively clean, low-cost and versatile fuel. It can directly generate power and heat and can be chemically altered to produce a wide range of useful commodity chemicals. It burns cleaner and more efficiently than other fossil fuels, releasing significantly fewer harmful pollutants into the atmosphere. Natural gas is colorless, odourless, shapeless, lighter than air and contains a mixture of several hydrocarbon gases, which are organic compounds consisting of some combination of hydrogen and carbon molecules.

The primary consumers of natural gas are the industrial (54.1 per cent), residential (26.6 per cent) and commercial sectors (19.3 per cent). Canada is the fifth largest natural gas producer after the United States, Russia, Iran and Qatar. Currently, all of Canada’s natural gas exports go to the United States through a network of pipelines, making Canada the largest foreign source of US natural gas imports. At the end of 2016, Canada had 76.7 trillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves and had produced 152 billion cubic metres of natural gas that year. It is forecasted that global natural gas consumption will double by 2035.