Surge Energy press released last week that it had (among other things) disposed of some non-core assets at Shaunavon and at Westerose. The bulk of the disposition appears to be at Shaunavon, where Barrel Oil Corp has announced to the BOE Report that it is the buyer. BOE Intel users will be able to find the identity of the other buyer for the Westerose assets using our AER Transfer tool.
Using public data tool Petro Ninja, we can see the Shaunavon assets currently held by Surge. The map below (Figure 1) shows the mineral rights held by Surge in yellow and the wells in red.
Figure 1
The aggregate production from the wells currently licensed to Surge according to the public domain is ~950 BOE/d, including 773 bbl/d of oil production in April 2024.
The peak production from this group of wells was in 2016 when oil production was ~3,600 bbl/d (~4,000 BOE/d in total).
Figure 2
For Surge, it was simply a non-core asset that the company was not spending any more capital on. In fact, the company had not spud a well in the area since 2019, with spuds declining every year since 2016 (Figure 3).
Figure 3 – Surge Energy Shaunavon area spuds by year
| Year | Spuds |
|---|---|
| 2016 | 23 |
| 2017 | 19 |
| 2018 | 13 |
| 2019 | 4 |
| 2020-2024 | 0 |
As a result of the complete lack of drilling activity in the area, it’s fairly easy to get a pretty good sense of what the decline rate is for this group of wells. Going back to April 2021, it would appear that these assets have declined at an annual rate of about 13%/yr.