While the technological advancements that have opened up vast North American onshore shale gas resources get the lion’s share of the publicity of late, there’s no shortage of other high-tech wonders occurring in the oil and gas industry that are truly cutting-edge — lodged firmly on the precipice of the once unimagined.

Even as crews worked frantically to plug the leak of oil gushing out of BP’s Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico in the weeks following its April 20 blowout, the implications for the industry were spreading more quickly than the oil slick itself, impacting on operations around the globe.

When British writer Rudyard Kipling visited the southeastern Alberta city of Medicine Hat in 1907 he famously commented that “this part of the country seems to have all hell for a basement,” referring to the area’s prodigious natural gas resources lighting the streets and heating the homes and factories of the prairie city.