| Feb 2010 |
| Source: Oilweek Magazine |
| The Fab Five |
| Why the Horn River, Montney, Cardium, Lower Shaunavon and Bakken plays give producers reason for optimism |
| by R.P. Stastny |
| The combination of horizontal drilling and multi-stage fracing is about as close as western Canada´s oilpatch gets to the Midas touch. What started in the U.S. shales has swept north into the B.C. shales and, along the way, unlocked southern Saskatchewan´s light oil resource plays, the Bakken and the Shaunavon. Now it´s Alberta´s turn with the Cardium. But not all that horizontal multi-stage technology touches turns to gold. Western plays are far from North America´s major population centres, so another component is vital to this alchemy. And that´s government commitment to levelling the playing field between Canadian and American resource plays. The Saskatchewan government has always known this. The B.C. administration understands it. And now, finally, Alberta´s embattled Tories seem finally to have recognized the province´s energy wealth can´t be taken for granted, that strong commodity prices and insatiable global demand is as unpredictable as next week´s weather, and that it´s time once again to stand by its oil and gas industry rather than sit on a three-legged stool at its udder. The result of this apparent epiphany is the emerging Cardium resource play. David Carey, ARC Energy Trust´s senior vice-president of capital markets, puts it quite succinctly: "Royalty structure is huge in these resource plays." So as oil settles in the US$70 range and gas prices creep slowly upward-if only, perhaps, in response to winter´s chill-and rig utilization improves, the locomotives pulling western Canada´s oilpatch into a brighter future are the Bakken, Lower Shaunavon, Montney, Horn River, and Cardium. |
Read more: http://www.oilweek.com/articles.asp?ID=710#ixzz0hsim96GR
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