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ANTICOSTI, Que. – The story of Pétrolia Inc.’s efforts to strike it rich on remote Anticosti Island and vault Quebec toward oil independence begins at the end of a rutted backwoods road.

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We’ve just turned right at kilometre marker 189 on the Trans-Anticosti, a mostly hard-packed gravel highway stretching some 266-km across this isle in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and now we’re jerking forward on a lumpy path mostly used by hunters. Streams have flooded the muddy route in places and every now and then, you can see a fleeting fox or the skull of a deer. Our pickup truck grinds to a crawl as we lurch to our final destination: The Pétrolia/Corridor Resources Inc. Chaloupe No.1 well.

A core sample taken here three years ago confirmed Anticosti’s Macasty shale formation hundreds of metres under the ground is saturated with oil. The stage is now set for a new era of exploration on Quebec’s biggest island as the search for conventional crude gives way to tight oil unlocked by fracturing.

Whether any of it can be pulled out of the rock and shipped to market in a way that generates a profit is another question entirely.