Calgary

Calgary exists because two rivers meet at the edge of the Canadian prairies, but it thrives because oil exists beneath the Alberta plains. The city was a North West Mounted Police fort in 1875, a ranching center by the 1890s, and a railway town by 1900. Then came Turner Valley in 1914—Alberta's first major oil discovery—and the city's metabolism changed permanently. Like an organism that discovers a new food source, Calgary reorganized its entire economy around extraction.

The post-war oil boom transformed Calgary from a frontier outpost into Canada's energy capital. The Leduc discovery of 1947 and the Pembina field in the 1950s drew hundreds of petroleum companies, and by the 1970s Calgary housed more corporate headquarters per capita than any Canadian city. Over 960 oil company offices, 4,300 petroleum-related firms, and 1,300 financial services companies cluster downtown, creating the kind of specialized ecosystem where knowledge spillovers make every firm smarter. Alberta's oil and gas industry contributes roughly $88 billion to provincial GDP—25% of the total—and supports 500,000 direct and indirect jobs.

But resource dependency creates boom-bust volatility that few other industries match. The 2014 oil price crash shed tens of thousands of jobs; the 2020 collapse repeated the trauma. Calgary's office vacancy rate topped 30% in parts of downtown, a visible scar of overspecialization. The city now pursues diversification through hydrogen (a $4.6 billion annual market in a net-zero future), carbon capture (the Deep Sky Alpha facility launched in 2025), and floating solar—the same pivot-from-extraction playbook that resource towns worldwide attempt, usually too late.

With 1.26 million residents and LNG Canada's first cargo shipped in June 2025, Calgary sits at the intersection of fossil fuel wealth and energy transition pressure—testing whether an apex predator of extraction can evolve into something more adaptable before its primary food source becomes a liability.