Quote:
Originally Posted by Bring_Back_Shantz
I'll take issue with that.
In a lot of ways the Montney was the proving grounds for a lot of the multi stage, multi well fracs that are now being used elsewhere.
The big advantage in Canada was the land situation, where companies could develop large swaths of land with huge multi well pads and long laterals.
That has only been a thing in a lot of the states (Texas in particular) because companies have shown small land owners the benefit of pooling land/mineral rights to allow for Canadian style development. Prior to that, the # of wells, and the length you could drill was limited due to the patchwork land situation, and that killed all of the efficiencies that Canadian had developed.
Once they got that straightened out, we saw the current shale oil/gas boom in the US.
The technology and techniques were there waiting for them, they just needed to figure out how to deploy them.
The reason a lot of the Canadian projects stalled in the 00/10s was the price of gas going into the toilet in ~2008, partially due to the global financial crisis, and partially due to the glut of supply precisely because of the type of development we're talking about.
I work for a company that operates in Canada and the US, and I can tell you that the technology flow, specifically when it comes to this kind of development, is very much more North to South than vis versa.
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You work at a company that's worked on both sides of the border? I've actually worked assets on both sides of the border, and a lot of this is not true. Specifically, what you describe about land is actually not fully accurate. In some cases (eg. North Dakota), pooling is actually much easier than it is Canada. I would definitely also say that companies that originally operated in Canada and then go to the US struggle with the transition and realize a lot of what they did in Canada doesn't work in the US.
I also didn't say that techniques in Canada (and Montney/Duvernay in particular) weren't used in the US or weren't the testing ground for a lot of technology. But the US basins that took off in the early stages of the shale revolution didn't need the technology or techniques to be successful. Canada's did and it took time for the technology to get there.
But to directly address your comment - the huge slickwater fracs that you now see as the norm did not start to catch on until 2015, with much more muted development before that. These were the fracs that really opened up production rates in a lot of these basins. The point of my comment was that these basins needed technology to catch up to make large-scale development possible, and this happened largely after the Harper government was out of power.