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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 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 fuelling 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 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 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. 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. 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
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easyPAY,
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