SCOTT SIMPSON, Vancouver Sun, September 15, 2010
Province's oil and gas reserves in the spotlight at international conference
The World Energy Congress taking place this week in Montreal has been an eye-opener for British Columbia Energy Minister Bill Bennett.
The straight-talking Kootenay East MLA is ascending a steep learning curve after taking over the high-profile cabinet job following Blair Lekstrom's abrupt departure in June.
One of the principal insights he has gained this week is that B.C.'s abundant energy resources are a known commodity at a conference that has attracted 5,000 international delegates.
In the first day and a half, Bennett was interviewed by The Economist and by U.K.-based Power Magazine, and lobbied by Siemens, a global leader in energy infrastructure engineering.
The kicker, however, was Royal Dutch Shell chief executive officer Peter Voser's detailed references to B.C.'s shale gas reserves in one of the keynote presentations on the opening morning.
"My impression is that we, for being a little frog in a big pond, are making a pretty big splash," Bennett said.
"I'm listening to [Voser] speak and all of a sudden he starts talking about shale gas in northeastern British Columbia. He spends about a third of his speech on Shell's shale gas play," Bennett recalled.
"That was my first inkling that people know where British Columbia is -- or if they didn't before this speech, they certainly do now."
Shell is focused on the Groundbirch area, part of the vast Montney tight gas formation near Dawson Creek in northeastern B.C., after amassing a major land position through takeovers and Crown drilling rights auctions.
As with the Horn River Basin near Fort Nelson, the Montney region represents a massive, multi-decade natural gas resource that requires sophisticated and innovative drilling technology to exploit.
That technology has touched off what Voser called a "natural gas supply revolution [that] has increased energy security for North America.
"And it has the potential to alter the energy landscape for the world as a whole.
"Only a few years ago, the assumption was that North America's gas production would decline. Today, instead of declining, production has increased dramatically."
The total North American volume of identified reserves is "now big enough to cover North America's current gas consumption for well over a century," Voser added.
Voser told the audience that Shell is now producing enough gas at Groundbirch to meet the needs of more than 400,000 homes.
"That sounds easy but it has actually taken many years of technology advances to get to the point where we could produce these complex types of fields economically and responsibly."
Shell has 175 producing wells at Groundbirch, four gas processing plants and plans for a fifth, plus 700-plus kilometres of gas pipelines.
It anticipates drilling an average 40 to 60 wells a year, but sees potential to increase that to 250 wells per year.
In spite of that, Shell believes it is still in the early stages of development of the resource and expects to intensify data gathering and analysis of its Groundbirch resource.
Bennett said he was also interested in assertions by Khalid al-Falih, president and CEO of Saudi Arabian oil giant Saudi Aramco, that gas and oil producers will continue to enjoy robust demand even as the developed world increasingly seeks alternative energy technologies.
"The assumption that we are going to make do with less is probably not the case any time soon.
"It was an interesting message; when you come from a place like British Columbia you can be lulled into the sense that pretty soon we are going to be able to wean ourselves off oil and gas. From a global perspective, that's not the case."
