This is the time of year to wrap up a lot of packages and tie them up with a bow. That includes Christmas gifts and this Petro Ninja – Enlighten Geoscience Well of the Week series looking at .Manitoba. Previous articles looked at the first oil well in the province, more recent discoveries and where the furthest east oil well lay in comparison to the rest of the WCSB. Now to complete the package by looking at one last, seemingly insignificant, well.
The core from the 100/11-15-012-29W1/00 well documents the presence of a productive Waulsortian Mud Mound (WMM) in the Cruikshank Crinoidal member of the Lodgepole Formation. The initial production from this WMM of over 400 bopd quickly dropped off and the operator moved on to the subcrop play uphole. But the presence of an underexploited productive facies was proven.
Those readers with longer memories will recall a WotW that discussed WMMs up over the Peace River Arch. A small private company, Islander Oil & Gas, has resuscitated the premiere discovery with 17 wells having a most recent production of over 1,500 bopd of bitumen. These WMMs hundreds of kilometres away in Alberta are hosted in the Pekisko. Not in the Lodgepole equivalent Banff, illustrating that this carbonate buildup is present and productive in more than one stratigraphic level.
In some ways the tremendous expanse of the WCSB can be hard to comprehend. That is one reason it is useful to look at a region like Manitoba as a microcosm of the greater whole. And a takeaway from reviewing the exploration history of Manitoba is that this province is underexplored. To quote from a Manitoba Regulatory Services fact sheet: “The vast majority of the approximately 11,400 wells drilled in Manitoba have only been drilled into the upper portion of the sedimentary sequence, to Triassic, Mississippian or Bakken formations. Only 137 wells have penetrated the entire sequence, leaving half the sequence, the older formations, largely unexplored.”.
A corollary is that the WCSB isn’t out of discoveries. Perhaps we should hope to unwrap some new concepts in those parcels under the tree.
My thanks to Michelle Nicolas of the Manitoba Geological Survey for suggesting the 11-15 well.
Reference
Manitoba Oil Facts. [https://www.gov.mb.ca/iem/petroleum/oilfacts/oilfacts.pdf] accessed 12-21-2022.
Nicolas, M.P.B. 2008: Williston Basin Project (Targeted Geoscience Initiative II): Results of the biostratigraphic sampling program, southwestern Manitoba (NTS 62F, 62G4, 62K3); Manitoba Science, Technology, Energy and Mines, Manitoba Geological Survey, Geoscientific Paper GP2008-1, 28 p. [https://www.manitoba.ca/iem/info/libmin/GP2008-1.pdf] accessed 12-20-2022.
Nicolas, M.P.B, and Barchyn, D. 2008: Williston Basin Project (Targeted Geoscience Initiative II): Summary report on Paleozoic stratigraphy, mapping and hydrocarbon assessment, southwestern Manitoba; Manitoba Science, Technology, Energy and Mines, Manitoba Geological Survey, Geoscientific Paper GP2008-2, 21 p. [https://www.manitoba.ca/iem/info/libmin/GP2008-2.pdf] accessed 12-20-2022.