Peter Lougheed was being remembered Friday for his rare ability to bridge the fickle world of politics and the business world with its demands for consistency in policy.

"There's lots of people who know what needs to be done but they don't combine that with the skill of knowing how to do it, how to make it happen," Lougheed confidant Jim Gray told CBC News.

"He had that. He had the whole deck," said Gray, a co-founder of gas giant Canadian Hunter and now an independent director of Toronto-based Brookfield.

Tributes were being paid to Lougheed, who died Thursday at age 84, for his many accomplishments in shaping modern Alberta and asserting provincial rights to resource ownership.

"He paved the road for us," Gerald Wendland, executive vice-president of Calgary-based Avatar Energy, told CBC News.

"He created an environment for the oil industry to flourish without onerous regulation."

Among his many accomplishments was Lougheed's leadership in developing the long-neglected oilsands by investing in Syncrude Canada, introducing tax measures to encourage exploitation of heavy oil and setting up the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority to develop better ways to increase oil recovery.

Perhaps less well known nationally is the role of Lougheed's government in supporting development of the province's natural gas industry, by establishing the Alberta Energy Company in 1974 to develop the resource in east central Alberta.

His government also embarked on a wide range of less glamorous but far-sighted infrastructure improvements from ranging from highway construction to extending a network of natural gas pipelines to farms, ranches and rural areas that had previously depended on propane storage tanks.

'I just don't think he had his peer.'—Jim Gray, Lougheed confidant

It was under Lougheed's leadership, according to former Conservative MP Lee Richardson, that Alberta was transformed from an "agrarian hinterland to the most dynamic province in Canada."

Gray said central to Lougheed's success was his breadth of intelligence and skills: his legal training at Harvard, experience in the corporate world and his political acumen.

"He understood business. He understood politics. He understood Alberta politics extremely well … and he was able to navigate that opaque area between business and politics very successfully. I've been in the province well over 50 years and watched many, many, politicians and I just don't think he had his peer."

And when it came time to pay for those public investments by raising oil royalties, that was done with much less acrimony than when the Alberta government led by premier Ed Stelmach did it in 2007, according to Gray.

At the time, the industry complained bitterly about what it felt was the province's lack of consultation. "It was traumatic the last time we did it," said Gray, "with all the acrimony and bitterness."

But Lougheed had such respect in the business community that it was a different story when he first raised royalties in the 1970s.

"Peter had such wonderful credibility, he had that momentum, he had all that political capital, and he could do it. He'd look you in the eye and he'd say, 'This is the right thing to do and this is what we're going to do.'"

CBC television will present a one-hour documentary on the Life and Times of Peter Lougheed on Saturday at 9 p.m. ET.