Neil Watson

If this Petro Ninja – Enlighten Geoscience Well of the Week series entry on formations associated with the Peace River Arch followed the usual format, an article on the Baldonnel would drone on with some rote recitation of a Bullmoose well with over 133 bcf of cumulative gas production (although referring to a well in the Foothills in a series in the Peace River Arch is kind of cheating) or the top cumulative oil producer from the Birch pool. But that opening paragraph was just a head fake as [Read more]

“Hold my beer.” Imagine, if you will, three anthropomorphized Triassic formations sitting around shooting the breeze.  As discussed in previous Petro Ninja – Enlighten Geoscience Wells of the Week, the Doig would say something along the lines of: Dougie Doig: “To explore for my hydrocarbons, you have to be able to project the locations of shoreface sediments using cues from offshore facies AND put these in the context of a significant unconformity.” And Harold Halfway would say: “Big [Read more]

As much as the current Petro Ninja – Enlighten Geoscience Well of the Week series has been a dissertation on the history of discoveries on the Peace River Arch, it has also been the tale of how these successes have fostered the cycle of start-ups recognizing a new play, selling out to a bigger company and starting over. The Dunvegan Debolt field and Anderson Exploration is an excellent example of this pattern. It is difficult to overstate how important the small to medium-sized companies are [Read more]

Faithful readers of the Petro Ninja – Enlighten Geoscience Well of the Week will recall that the Doig manifests hydrocarbon accumulations where shoreface complexes subcrop against the Charlie Lake, and that these shorefaces can be recognized hundreds of kilometres along strike. The Halfway does the Doig one better by throwing at least one more unconformity and some structuring into the mix.  Caplan and Moslow (1997) document that the Halfway in Peejay and similar fields is a north – south [Read more]

The previous two Petro Ninja – Enlighten Geoscience Wells of the Week focused on a pool that provided an interesting sequence stratigraphy case study and a sedimentological oddity rooted in the collapse of the Peace River Arch. This Well of the Week rounds out the triptych of Doig vignettes by recalling a resource play variant. The Doig “Phosphates” which were so important in predicting the up-dip conventional shoreface reservoirs were also a hot topic in the early days of sussing out the [Read more]

Last week we discussed the importance of recognizing regional unconformities, correlating offshore sequences to predict where these will culminate in reservoir facies, and the interplay between the two. This week the Petro Ninja – Enlighten Geoscience Well of the Week will focus on a singular sedimentary feature of the Doig formation that was the subject of much study from 1989 through 2011. Agreement was reached early on in the debate to refer to these features with the (somewhat ponderous) [Read more]

Now, if you were expecting me to follow up a post on the Belloy with one on the Montney, you will be disappointed. But it is not like there is a shortage of words dissecting the Montney these days, so I have leapfrogged over that part of the Peace River Arch stratigraphic column. This Petro Ninja – Enlighten Geoscience Well of the Week will focus on the Doig, a formation that is fascinating in its own right. The first example of this allure is how the Doig can be a case study for [Read more]

Is there a formation in the WCSB less understood than the Belloy? With all of the research in the basin, why have so few papers focused on the Permian? The histogram shown below highlights papers found through a search of sources including The Atlas and The Bulletin of Canadian Energy Geoscience that included a reference to the Belloy. Since 1949 there have only been 47 in total. Of these articles, only half discussed the Belloy in any more than peripheral terms. Only 12 delved into the [Read more]

Well of the Week – Wells that make you go “Hmm……” No. III The Canadian oil and gas industry has been beset by numerous challenges over the last decade:  low commodity prices, restricted access to markets, and, most recently, unrealistic expectations about phasing out oil and gas. It has been a long tack against strong headwinds that are only now starting to abate. Several authors have commented on these obstacles. Some have taken to tilting at windmills, seeing monsters on every horizon. If I [Read more]

Perhaps last week’s  Petro Ninja – Enlighten Geoscience Well of the Week gave the impression that the Kiskatinaw was solely a high-risk/high-reward play. Well, I apologize if  I painted that picture, because that is only partially true.  A different style of play was exploited east of the big structural plays. The same understanding of the tectonically controlled sedimentation patterns in the Stoddart Group allowed for the identification of gas pools updip of the Dunvegan Debolt Gas field [Read more]