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Searching for next B.C. hot spot
Don Whiteley Petroleum News contributing writer-Vancouver
While energy giant EnCana is conducting an aggressive 70-well summer natural gas drilling program in Northeast British Columbia, a much smaller team of professional geologists and earth scientists is trying to uncover more secrets to what might be the province's next exploration hot spot.
Led by Vancouver-based Geological Survey of Canada Scientist Dr. Carol Evenchick, the joint GSC-B.C. Energy Ministry team is conducting more geological mapping activities and taking rock samples in an effort to identify what could turn into the province's next oil and gas “elephant.”
The Bowser and Sustut basins in northwest British Columbia have in the last year leapfrogged other areas to the top of the list, and could see preliminary industry activity as early as next winter.
The interest comes courtesy of a dramatic change in geologists' opinions about the area's potential. For many years it was seen as having little promise because high pressures and temperatures in the creation of sedimentary rock formations had “overcooked” and destroyed any oil or gas that might have been present. Dome drilled 30 years ago Thirty years ago, Dome Petroleum drilled two wells in the region, but abandoned the effort because they appeared to be more natural gas prone, and gas prices were in the tank at the time.
Last spring, the B.C. Energy Ministry and the Geological Survey of Canada made a joint presentation in Calgary on the Bowser's oil and gas potential, and more than 90 people representing a broad cross section of the North American energy industry showed up.
Since then, several of those companies have expressed interest in the region, although none has yet asked the province to put up any petroleum rights for bidding. That, according to one GSC official, could come as early as next winter.
Kirk Osadetz, head of the Energy and Environment section in the GSC's Calgary office, outlined several new developments that have taken place within the last year to revive interest in the Bowser — and he credits Carol Evenchick's 10 years of research for the change of opinion. Overcooking not widespread First, Evenchick's work showed that the overcooking problem (as evidenced by the region's numerous high grade coal deposits) was not widespread through the region. Oil and gas within the sedimentary rocks is likely still intact.
Second, and in Osadetz's opinion most important, she identified something in the rocks called a triangle zone that runs for as much as 130 kilometers along the eastern edge of the mountains in the Bowser basin.
“This type of zone is known worldwide as being a very good prospect for oil and gas,” Osadetz said. “Another example is Turner Valley, Alberta, which has a billion barrels of oil in place. The Bowser's triangle zone is just like that one.”
Since last July, field workers have found evidence of crude oil in some of the rock samples collected, and there have been anecdotal reports of oil seeping to the surface near the Bowser's triangle zone — much the same way as occurred in Turner Valley. Resource estimate being revised In 1995, the GSC published a resource estimate for the Bowser, Sustut, and Whitehorse trough (to the north) that put the resource potential at 2.5 billion barrels of oil and 13.7 trillion cubic feet of gas. But that report was prepared well before the latest information was collected, and the Geological Survey of Canada is now in the process of revising those figures upward.
Should the summer geological program continue to generate positive results, officials in both the GSC and the B.C. Energy Ministry expect the next step would be for a company, or companies, to request that land parcels be put up for competitive bids. After that, the successful bidders will need to conduct extensive seismic programs to identify drilling candidates for exploratory wells.
With industry activity imminent, ministry officials say they are already talking to communities in the area through a series of open houses, and to First Nations bands with as-yet unresolved land claims that might cover any potential drilling sites.
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