The rocket fuel that propelled the Saturn V rocket and the Apollo 11 moon mission into space 50 summers ago on July 16, 1969, was invented in Canada in 1848.
Before the Hudson’s Bay Company sold Rupert’s Land to the dominion in 1870 for $1.5 million and 96 million acres of land, the future of Canadian oil was in New Brunswick.
For two centuries after 1670, the value of the northwest territories to European colonizers was in beaver and other animal pelts that Hudson’s Bay Company fur traders acquired from the First Nations.
The hidden mineral wealth of Rupert’s Land – oil, gas, uranium and diamonds -- were 20th century discoveries that the Hudson’s Bay Company of Gentlemen Adventurers could not imagine.
A lamp oil called camphene, distilled from turpentine, replaced whale oil as the staple lamp fuel after 1840 when the price of whale oil soared due to overhunting of the ocean mammals.
In New Brunswick, Dr. Abraham Gesner, a physician, surgeon, geologist and inventor extracted kerosene from albertite bitumen in 1848 to manufacture lamp oil.
In 1862, the United States Congress had slapped a tax on alcohol to pay for the Civil War. The tax included an industrial-grade alcohol additive used to make camphene lamp oil.
The resulting price jump for camphene gave kerosene a market much, much larger than its initial use in New York City’s street lamps. Whale oil cost $2.50 per gallon, camphene sold for 50 cents per gallon, coal oil was also 50 cents per gallon but was sooty, smelly and of relatively low quality.
New Brunswick’s bitumen and oil shale attracted fortune seekers to Atlantic Canada where they drilled unsuccessfully for oil deposits. Only in Gaspé was a small conventional oilfield discovered and produced.
Cleaner-burning refined oil from the first commercial wells found in Pennsylvania and southwestern Ontario in1859 found a ready market as lamp oil.
These discoveries put the only successful Canadian oil shale project, on Georgian Bay near the Great Lakes shipping port of Collingwood, out of business.
The owners of the shale-sourced oil had just obtained a contract to supply Canadian Great Lakes lighthouses with lamp oil when cheaper crude oil discovered at Petrolia near Windsor snatched the business out their hands.
Until conventional oil was discovered on the Canadian and U.S. sides of the Great Lakes, and before the Alberta oilsands were developed, New Brunswick was Canada’s oil province.
Although electricity replaced lamps and gasoline distilled from crude oil dominated 20th century transportation fuel, kerosene’s ease of storage and stable properties inspired rocket engine research and testing using kerosene-based fuel.
The research and development led to the Saturn V’s five Rocketdyne F-1 engines fuelled by RP-1 (rocket propellant-1 or refined petroleum-1), a fancy name for oil-based kerosene.
Among Abraham Gesner’s achievements was the first step to make a fuel for travel in space – an achievement he could not have imagined.
– Frank Dabbs is a veteran business and political journalist, author and editor.
