Texas money is flowing into a small corner of Canada’s oilsands at a time when big international companies are pulling out.
While Marten Hills is located in an oilsands region, producers including Cenovus Energy Inc., Deltastream Energy Corp. and Spur Petroleum Ltd. are employing multilateral drilling techniques used in shale to tap the Clearwater rock formation more than 1,600 feet underground, well below the oilsands that have traditionally drawn companies to the region.
Investment in Western Canada’s oilpatch has been declining since global oil prices started to collapse in 2014. A shortage of export pipelines made things worse last year, causing local crude prices to plunge and prompting the provincial government to impose output caps. Recoverable OilOil production has only reached about 10,000 barrels a day but is poised to expand once the pipeline starts operating next year, Millar said. The area could yield 390 million barrels of oil if just 3 per cent of its crude is recovered, but the nearby Pelican Lake has a 28 per cent recovery rate using the so-called polymer flooding technique where liquid is injected into the ground to force more oil to the surface.