Pan Canadian Petroleum representatives told those attending last week’s Open House presentations at Heinsburg Community Club and King George Hall that they are planning to drill just over 200 new wells in the coming year, many of them in the Frog Lake area.
Jack Livingston, who represents the Exploration division, said that land acquisition activity “has been staggering in the past 18 months,” with over 100 sections of new r acquisition. “It’s going to be a very busy area.’
Pan Canadian is in partnership with Elan Energy on additional land, and will be meeting with them to discuss even more drilling activity, Livingston said. He recalled Dennis Chorney’s remark at last year’s open house that Pan Canadian planned to stay in the area for some time, and said that the area is still “very key in our plans. We will be constantly drilling wells and acquiring land in the next few years.”
Livingston pointed to a map covered with yellow and pink squares, the latter being the new acquisitions, mostly of crown land. The yellow squares are designated as “fee lands,” which were the lands set aside for the Canadian Pacific Railway at the time of land settlement. “This heritage is our biggest asset. We don’t pay as much royalty on this as on the crown land.” CP is a major shareholder in Pan Canadian.
One colorful display showed the various kinds of geological exploration, including seismic studies, well logs and drill cores, which are done to determine the presence of oil far beneath the earth’s surface. Livingston said this display “gives people a chance to see what processes are involved” in exploration, and feels it would be of interest to young people seeking careers. “Not a lot of people are going into geology and geophysics,” he noted, however there are many jobs in that field. Other displays included aerial maps of the area with an overlay showing land locations, wellsites and pipelines, photos and diagrams showing the “construction and drilling of slant wells on various configurations of site pads, and a stratigraphic chart outlining the age of the various rock formations at locations across Canada and the northern USA. The oil-bearing formations in this area are in Sparky, General Petroleum, Lloydminster and Cummings zones, all of which date back to the Early Cretaceous period, 98 to 144 million years ago. Also on display was a map of the routes used by oil and water tankers in the area, and a diagram showing advanced oil recovery techniques and how they work.
OIL INDUSTRY MOVES UP TOWN - We're not sure if there is oil under downtown Elk Point, but service rigs such as this, which was undergoing maintenance along Railway Ave. last week, are sure to keep busy next year, with many new wells planned for the area.
