In October 2023, Tourmaline Oil Corp acquired Bonavista Energy Corporation for $1.45 billion. It was their largest acquisition to date — Tourmaline’s number of wells effectively doubled overnight.
Then came the hard part — transferring more than 6,000 well licenses between AB, BC, and SK and ingesting over 500,000 land and well files. An acquisition of this size would take most O&G companies months to complete.
Magda Schmidt, Supervisor of Surface Land Admin at Tourmaline, says, “Before StackDX, we would hire consultants to help with categorization and metadata tagging. For 500,000 files, we’d be looking at six months and hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
But the worst part isn’t the time or the cost — it’s human error. Every consultant interprets documents slightly differently, so it’s easy for files to be miscategorized. Retroactively catching and cleaning up mistakes is nearly impossible. “We work in such a fast-paced environment that taking the time to go and clean up somebody else’s work is unrealistic,” Magda says.