For the past year we’ve been looking at the potential of our 100%-owned Cadotte Project to support a cold heavy oil production component, as we reported last June. This was a result of some new findings in our Resource Evaluation of the western portion of our project, which boosted our resource by 3.4 billion barrels in-place, of which 887 are estimated to be recoverable using existing technology.
Due to its relatively low cost and favorable economics, cold production in the Peace River area has become a major focus of several producers including Baytex Energy. The region also hosts several cold production operations by other large producers such as Shell, Husky and Murphy Oil. Here is a current map of where our project is, relative to Shell and Koch.
Cold heavy oil production with sand or CHOPS, is a technique for extracting heavy crude oil where sand is allowed into the wellbore with the heavy oil, and is then pumped to the surface much like a conventional well. This method is ideal for 5-20m zones, which would be consistent with Strata’s Cadotte West property, where the Net Thickness of the Bluesky/Gething ore zone appears to range from about 10 m to 20 m. This is a non-thermal means of oil extraction which is used in thousands of oil wells in Canada (where the technology was pioneered).
Our technical team expects to complete its seismic study sometime later this month.
Posted by Trevor Newton, Chairman of the Board