The first major oil discovery in Alberta was made on February 13, 1947, near the town of Leduc, south of Edmonton. As early as 1914, oil reserves were known to exist in the southern parts of Alberta (see Turner Valley, Alberta), but they produced very little oil compared to those around Edmonton. Additional oil reserves were discovered in the late 1940s and the 1950s near the town of Redwater. Because most of Alberta's oil reserves were concentrated in central and northern Alberta, Edmonton became home to most of Alberta's oil industry.
The subsequent oil boom gave Edmonton new status as the "Oil Capital of Canada," and during the 1950s, the city increased in population from 149,000 to 269,000. After a relatively calm but still prosperous period in the 1960s, the city's growth took on renewed vigour concomitant with high world oil prices, triggered by the 1973 oil crisis and the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The oil boom of the 1970s and 1980s ended abruptly with the sharp decline in oil prices on the international market and the introduction of the National Energy Program in 1981; that same year, the population had reached 521,000. Although the National Energy Program was later scrapped by the federal government in the mid-1980s, the collapse of world oil prices in 1986 and massive government cutbacks kept the city from making a full economic recovery until the late 1990s.
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