My project explores how oil companies, government agencies, and community organizations in Alberta use oil to describe a set of values about land use, labour, and aspiration. Oil, in Alberta, is a key symbolic element in imagining what a good life is. To explore these messages about goodness, my project follows oil through four key cultural portraits grounded in my ethnographic and archival work. The first portrait establishes how the Christian colonial project of settlement in western Canada articulated what good land and good citizens were, setting up the value system that would later be adopted by oil companies describing their own virtues to the public. The second portrait reflects on my time spent in “Energy Heritage” sites to describe how government bodies and heritage organizations have used historical narratives of extraction to articulate Albertan values. My project’s third portrait examines how private and municipal actors in Alberta’s white collar oil centre--Calgary--transform the inherited ‘Albertan’ values into a corporate culture where aspirations of success and wealth are equated with innovation and grit. Finally, the last portrait brings the cultural productions of the past, contemporary heritage imaginations, and corporate culture together at the Calgary Stampede; a rodeo and exhibition in which the goodness associated with oil labour, extractive land use, and assertive aspiration is articulated as specifically ‘western’. My project presents a clear eyed attempt to discover the deep tie between oil and the social worlds of value in North America.