The emergence of the Montney, Duvernay, and other liquids rich plays over the last number of years shone a bright light on a significant gap in the public data reporting for Alberta producers. This blind spot was a direct result of the Directive 17 imposed practice of reporting field condensate volumes for a gas well as gas equivalent volumes, where the field condensate was being recombined into the gathered gas stream. While the hydrocarbon liquid data for such wells existed, access to this information was being restricted to only those producers with an interest in the well.
In the fall of 2020, Hammerhead Resources launched an industry lobby targeting the reclassification of these gas plant tailgate volumes to be published and available within the public domain. “The data gap was a much talked about problem for industry stakeholders for many years. Our view was that someone needed to step up and bring some focus to solving this deficiency,” states Marcel Preteau, a former manager with Hammerhead. “With Petrinex’s new publication of this data, the industry directly benefits in terms of being able to make better and more informed decisions relating to well design, optimizing reservoir exploitation, and improving capital investment decision. Ultimately, this is about improving Alberta’s competitiveness within the global hydrocarbon marketplace”.
Fast forward to today, and the decision has been made to have this data part of the public record. BOE Intel and Petro Ninja will offer that data as some of the first products to do. This data will include historical NGL production in Alberta as well.
For example, if we looked yesterday in the public domain, this group of 123 Duvernay wells licensed to PetroChina near Kaybob would have only shown us the gas equivalent volumes (the red line in Figure 1), with the liquids stream being missing from public reporting. But now we can see the full production stream by commodity type. We can see that the public reporting would have been blind to almost 6,000 bbl/d of Pentane production (a near condensate equivalent) from these wells. As part of the ability to view the full liquids stream, we can now also view residue gas, or marketable gas which would be the gas volumes left over after stripping out the liquids.
This is truly a new age for public data reporting, and BOE Intel and Petro Ninja aim to be at the forefront of it.
Figure 1 – Production from 123 Duvernay wells licensed to PetroChina near Kaybob (hover over for details)