Neil Watson

Stampede is on and your boots are both as shiny as the sun but (hopefully) with a few blots from the stables to make it real. (It has been a couple of years so a reminder, jean cuffs belong on the outside of your boots). The Stampede provides a slip off the traces a bit and think outside the corral. For instance, this Petro Ninja – Enlighten Geoscience Well of the Week provides a good opportunity to highlight both an oil producer and a speculative exploration. This particular Granite Wash [Read more]

The Petro Ninja – Enlighten Geoscience Well of the Week follows up on the tale of the Lodgepole Blowout by for October is a focus on the well that launched the modern Canadian oil and gas industry: 100/05-22-00-26W4/00 otherwise, and better, known as Leduc No. 1. The story has been told countless times, so what new light can the WotW shed on this well? Let us see. George Longphee was a pioneer in the industry and involved in choosing the 5-22 location. He was also my sister-in-law’s father, [Read more]

I’m thinking back. Way back before anyone heard of bingeing a series through a streaming service. Further back then when cable brought dozens of channels into our homes. Back to when the introduction of a third (A third channel! Can you imagine?) channel was big news for Calgary. Those were the days when, if you missed the latest episode of The Beachcombers, you had to wait for summer re-runs to catch the excitement. And why, you ask, do I bring up summer re-runs? Because I ran into a lot of [Read more]

After the Nordegg the Petro Ninja – Enlighten Geoscience Well of the Week ran into a bit of ‘writer’s block’ on the upwards sojourn through the plays of the Peace River Arch. The next formation in line is, of course, the Cadomin.  And an excellent example of an Arch Cadomin producer is 200/A-014-A 093-P-08/00. It is (you guessed it) a Deep Basin well. And what original thoughts are left to express about yet another prolific Deep Basin well? Proclaiming once again the wonders of the Deep Basin [Read more]

I remember reading, in the aftermath of John Lennon’s assassination, a quote attributed to Mick Jagger. As I recall, it read: “The surprise isn’t that the Beatles broke up. It is that the Rolling Stones didn’t.” This Petro Ninja – Enlighten Geoscience Well of the Week is, sensu stricto, about 100/15-05-066-24W5/00. Isn’t it well worth focusing an unstimulated vertical well that produced over 45,000 m3 of 17 API oil from a shale? It didn’t hurt that this well is, at 14.4 kPa/m, overpressured, [Read more]

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]