Ontario's small producers using old-school ways to beat oil rout

Calgary

CHARLIE Fairbank, the great grandson of one of the world's first oilmen, has turned to a century-old technology to keep his 350 Ontario oil wells competitive in a world of US$35 crude.

Using a single engine and wooden jerkers - rods that connect to multiple pumps - Mr Fairbank is producing the same 65 barrels a day his family has been extracting since the 19th century in Oil Springs, birthplace of the Petroleum Age. It's there that asphalt seller James Miller Williams struck oil in 1858, a year before Edwin Drake drilled his famous well in Titusville, Pennsylvania.

"If careful, we got another 100 years," Mr Fairbank, 74, said in …