Well of the Week – Furthest east oilwell in WCSB

Earlier in this Petro Ninja – Enlighten Geoscience Well of the Week series on the petroleum geology of Manitoba we learned that the oil industry made its initial Manitoba discovery soon after Leduc No. 1. Exploration success continued into this millennium at a stratigraphic level just slightly older than Manitoba’s overwhelmingly Mississippian aged production. What else can we discover about this somewhat neglected portion of the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin? There is a lot of focus on plays on the western edge of the. And rightly so, but did you ever wonder about how far east the production in he WCSB extends?

This honour goes to 100/16-14-001-21W1/00. None of the three events in this well on the fringe of the Lulu Lake Lodgepole Virden pool come close to making a top 10 producer list. And there is not much to be gained by looking at a suite of early 1950s well logs. The entire pool could itself be seen as the last gasp of the basin’s potential. One final Mississippian subcrop to be exploited. Manitoba is played out.

Map courtesy of Petro Ninja

But what if it is the exploration paradigm that is exhausted? Sinclair has shown that Manitoba has more to offer an inventive explorer than Lodgepole subcrops. When the Lulu Lake is considered relative to the Phanerozoic Isopach, it is apparent that there is lots of production along the WCSB strike.

After Wright et al. (1994)

The industry has come a long way with subsurface models. And we are targeting different resources. Perhaps it is time to have another look at this part of the basin.

More on this microcosm of the WCSB next week.

Reference

Wright, G.N., McMechan, M. E., Potter, D. E. G. and Holter M. E. (1994): Structure and Architecture of the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin; in Geological Atlas of the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin, G.D. Mossop and I. Shetsen (comp.), Canadian Society of Petroleum Geologists and Alberta Research Council, URL http://ags.aer.ca/publications/chapter-28-geological-history-of-the-peace-river-arch.html, [04/26/2020].