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Providing coverage of Alaska and northern Canada's oil and gas industry
January 2006

Vol. 11, No. 4 Week of January 22, 2006

Sands innovator to demonstrate process

Petrobank Energy and Resources is about to launch an oil sands pilot project that could place the company on the leading edge of a technological breakthrough.

The Calgary-based junior said its 84-percent-owned Whitesands venture to demonstrate its patented toe-to-heel air injections process is due for commissioning this month and start-up is scheduled for early February.

Petrobank President John Wright said in a statement there has been growing interest recently by European-based fund managers and investors in the Whitesands opportunities, along with the company’s conventional Canadian asset base (which produced 4,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day in 2005) and its international activities in Latin America.

In response to that attention, Petrobank has received approval for a secondary listing of its common shares in the Oslo Stock Exchange in Norway, contingent upon successful completion early this year of a prospectus that is expected to generate gross proceeds of C$10 million-$20 million.

New combustion process

The Whitesands technology involves testing a new combustion process that combines a vertical air injection well with a horizontal production well.

The company said that during the process a combustion front is created where part of the oil in the reservoir is burned, generating heat which reduces the viscosity of the oil allowing it to flow to the horizontal production well.

The combustion front sweeps the oil from the toe to the heel of the horizontal well recovering an estimated 80 percent of the original oil in place while partially upgrading the crude oil in-situ, Petrobank said on its Web site.

The so-called toe-to-heel air injections process was discovered in 1993 and has been advanced through laboratory runs and field scale simulation models.

Petrobank hopes that its initial three well pairs will achieve peak combined output of 1,800 barrels per day.

Costs of the initial pilot phase have increased to C$39 million from C$30 million, said Petrobank.

—Gary Park






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