British Columbia’s Crown petroleum and natural gas land sale history tells a fascinating story of the evolution of the province’s oil and gas industry.
There was the great Montney land rush of the late 2000s, when companies scrambled to establish positions in what was still an emerging unconventional play. There was the long decline that followed as the best acreage increasingly found its way into industry hands and industry cash flows stagnated. Then there was the hiatus where BC Crown land sales effectively disappeared amid the uncertainty surrounding Indigenous treaty rights in northeast B.C.
Now the market is coming back, albeit very cautiously.
While the scale of the new land rush bears little resemblance to 2007 and 2008, companies are paying more per hectare this year than they did at the height of the original boom in 2008.
The original Montney land rush
The first chart tells the long-term story.
Crown petroleum and natural gas rights were enormous in size through much of the 1990s and early to mid 2000s. But the financial value of those sales exploded in the latter part of the 2000s as industry began to understand the potential of unconventional development in northeast B.C. The emergence of the Montney was the major driver.
By 2008, the land rush was reaching extraordinary levels. B.C. reported that its July 2008 sale alone generated $610 million, the largest sale in provincial history. In total, 2008 saw more than $2.6 billion enter government coffers from BC Crown sales. That’s a lot of teachers, schools, hospitals, doctors, nurses, firefighters and social programs.
This was industry effectively placing its bets on the future of the Montney. Those bets turned out to be pretty good.
The Montney subsequently developed into one of North America’s largest and most important natural gas and liquids plays. Companies that accumulated large contiguous positions during those early years ended up controlling acreage that today supports decades of drilling inventory.
After the land rush
But eventually the vast majority of the rights capture phase for the Montney had been done and Crown acreage transacting at land sales began to decline. Then the amount of money the BC government was pulling in at land sales began to plummet with the onset of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008-2009.
Large companies had assembled their core positions, consolidation transferred existing acreage between producers, and the unleased land that remained was less prospective than in prior years.
That distinction is important when looking at today’s numbers.
The late-2000s Crown sales represented companies assembling enormous positions in an emerging resource play. Today’s sales are occurring at a time when much of the most desirable Montney acreage has already been tied up.
Then the land sale system encountered an entirely different issue.
Crown land sales cease while the province, First Nations and industry rethink development
In June 2021, the B.C. Supreme Court’s Yahey v. British Columbia decision found that the cumulative effects of industrial development had infringed Blueberry River First Nations’ Treaty 8 rights.
The implications for development in northeast B.C. were significant.
B.C. paused petroleum and natural gas tenure dispositions for all of 2022 and 2023, before sales resumed in 2024.
The pause was about much more than Crown land auctions. It forced the province, First Nations and industry to rethink how future development would occur across northeast B.C.
In January 2023, B.C. and Blueberry River First Nations reached an implementation agreement establishing new limits on petroleum and natural gas development, new land-use planning processes and protection from new petroleum, natural gas and forestry activity across more than 650,000 hectares.
The province subsequently described the agreement as providing greater stability and predictability for industry while protecting the ability of Blueberry members to exercise their Treaty rights.
Against that backdrop, Crown land-sale activity eventually restarted.
A cautious return
The recovery is clearly visible in the recent data.
Very little activity occurred when land sales initially resumed in 2024. But the numbers have since picked up in 2025 and again in 2026, albeit with only a few parcels driving the majority of the bonus. In fact, 2 large parcels represent almost the entire amount of result bonus in 2026.
The amount of land transacting at these sales has also increased, although it remains tiny compared with historical levels.
That makes the third chart particularly interesting.
During the original Montney rush, B.C. could sell mineral rights for hundreds of thousands of hectares in a year. Recent sales have involved only a fraction of that amount.
There simply isn’t another vast undeveloped Montney land position waiting for industry to acquire. At least as far as today’s drilling technology knows.
What appears to be happening instead is competition for a much smaller inventory of acreage that companies consider strategically valuable.
The price of scarcity
That shows up dramatically in price per hectare.
Average Crown land prices were roughly $900 per hectare in 2018 and $800 per hectare in 2019 before activity collapsed.
When sales returned in 2024, pricing was initially modest. Then it jumped.
Average pricing increased to roughly $3,000 per hectare in 2025 and approximately $4,500 per hectare in 2026.
That 2026 figure is particularly noteworthy because it exceeds the roughly $3,500-per-hectare overall average recorded during the feverish 2008 year.
The comparison needs some qualification. Today’s sales involve dramatically fewer hectares, and averages can be heavily influenced by a relatively small number of attractive parcels (in this case 2 large parcels this year). Compare that to the 2008 market which involved an enormous amount of acreage and billions of dollars of capital.
But that qualification doesn’t take away from the fact that select acreage is still fetching very strong prices.
Industry isn’t indiscriminately buying enormous swaths of northeast B.C. Those days are gone. Now operators are selectively paying up for the remaining pieces.
The Montney enters a different phase
The Crown sale data therefore tell two different Montney stories separated by almost two decades.
The first was a land grab.
Companies were trying to understand a new resource, establish positions and capture enough acreage to prove up enormous drilling inventories. Hundreds of thousands of hectares changed hands annually and bonus payments surged into the billions.
The second is about scarcity.
The Montney is no longer speculative. Its geology, productivity and economics are much better understood. Infrastructure has expanded dramatically, and Canada’s growing LNG export capacity has created another potential outlet for northeast B.C. natural gas.
But the inventory of desirable unleased Crown acreage is nothing like it was 20 years ago.
That combination — greater certainty about the value of the resource and much less land available to acquire — helps explain why relatively small Crown offerings can still attract aggressive bids.
The rebound also remains cautious. The new framework governing development in northeast B.C. includes considerably more consideration of cumulative effects, land-use planning and Treaty rights than existed during the original Montney rush. Crown dispositions have resumed, but not under the same rules or circumstances that governed the boom years. The province’s current schedule shows regular disposition dates once again through 2026.
The enormous Crown bonuses of 2007 and 2008 may never return. Most of the Montney acreage that industry desperately wanted back then is already owned.
But nearly two decades after companies spent billions securing those positions, the remaining pieces are attracting prices that would not have looked out of place during the original rush.
The Montney land grab may be over. The value industry places on good Montney land clearly isn’t.
StackDX Intel now includes recent BC Land Postings and Land Results. Check it out here, or click here for more details on the StackDX suite of software solutions for oil & gas data, including client testimonials and case studies.
