This predated my career as well, and it's tough for anyone to remember now since gas has been comatose for almost 13 years now, but gas did really run show here. For all the fights over oil sands, mining super projects, and oil pipelines NG is the sleeping giant in the basin that probably has a much brighter long term future than oil. With the supplanting of coal by gas in the power generation market and the worldwide trade of LNG we could see it take back the title. I don't know much about shallow gas but i listen to most of the major conference calls of major companies in town and I've heard them hype the Montney many times, a lot of them calling it a world class asset and a crown jewel. All the biggest natural gas companies now got there from drilling montney. The chairman of CNRL even said one time that if the Montney was in the US it would be getting drilled to bits and would be the premier unconventional gas basin, even more than their main basins that have allowed their production to explode. The only reason there isn't a frenzy of activity there is because in Canada we're too cool to build pipelines to allow for production growth.
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