Vintage sets aim on Canada

Gary Park, Petroleum News Calgary Correspondent

The Canadian subsidiary of Vintage Petroleum rates 2003 as a “very important” year for its northern operations, with a heavy emphasis on frontier prospects, said Chief Executive Officer Craig George.

“We feel like we’re at a turning point in Canada,” he told analysts in a conference call on May 8.

The company is evaluating exploration play concepts on licenses that are 50 percent owned and cover 440,000 net acres of the Central Mackenzie Valley. But this year’s drilling in the Northwest Territories has been disappointing, including a dry hole drilled in partnership with Devlan Exploration in the Grandview Hills area of Peel Plateau and a failure to find commercial quantities of gas from testing three wells that were drilled two winters ago.

But George said Vintage is seeking core area acquisitions to focus on potentially high-impact exploration, such as the Foothills trend of northeastern British Columbia. The company plans five Foothills wells to depths of 5,000 to 8,250 feet, targeting gas reservoirs.

It also agreed to conduct exploration activities as operator on four Nova Scotia onshore blocks, which cover 1.5 million gross acres. A 4,900-foot oil well is planned for the third quarter, said George, who rated the prospect at 15 million barrels on a gross unrisked basis.

The Tulsa, Okla.-based independent needs an early lift to reverse a decline in first-quarter Canadian production to 4,156 barrels of oil per day and 65.3 million cubic feet of gas from 5,866 barrels of oil and 79.5 million cubic feet of gas a year earlier.