PETRONAS Energy Canada – drilling, production and activity update – BOE Intel

With LNG Canada continuing to progress towards becoming Canada’s first major LNG project, we thought it would be worthwhile to provide an update on the drilling activity of some of the project’s partners.  Last month, we provided an update on Shell Canada, and today we will take look at what PETRONAS Energy Canada has been up to using public data tools BOE Intel and Petro Ninja. Recall that PETRONAS owns a 25% stake in LNG Canada.

PETRONAS Energy Canada’s main producing asset was acquired from Progress Energy over decade ago, and covers a large portion of the northeast BC Montney play (see Figure 1).  Since the start of 2018, PETRONAS has drilled 213 wells, almost exclusively focused on the Montney. Interestingly, while many oil and gas producers slowed down activity during the Covid commodity price crash, PETRONAS has maintained a fairly stable level of activity over the last few years (see Figure 2). Since 2020 and continuing through the first part of this year, PETRONAS seems to spud about 50 wells per year.

Figure 1 – PETRONAS crown mineral rights (yellow) and well spuds since the beginning of 2018 (purple)

Figure 2 – Wells drilled by year

Spud Date	Wells drilled
2018	8
2019	30
2020	47
2021	53
2022	51
2023	24

Using only those wells spud since the beginning of 2018, we can see that PETRONAS has been able to bring on almost 0.5 bcf/d of natural gas on a gross licensed basis, plus some associated liquids (Figure 3). 168 wells are counting in that cumulative production number, which is as of the end of March 2023. Figure 3 from Petro Ninja is an embedded chart so users can hover over the chart to see the production details.

In total, Petro Ninja lists current natural gas production on a gross licensed basis for PETRONAS Energy Canada at 833 mmcf/d at the end of March 2023. Note that gross licensed production does not take into account wells licensed to other companies or any working interest amounts so may not reflect total corporate production.

Figure 3 – cumulative production from wells spud since Jan 1, 2018

While the licensing process in BC was halted for most of 2022, PETRONAS was able to get lots of well licences in since the Blueberry River First Nations agreement was signed in early 2023. Over the last year, PETRONAS has licensed 100 wells in northeast BC (see Figure 4), with 91 of those since the beginning of 2023.

Figure 4 – PETRONAS well licences over the last year

This article used public data tools BOE Intel and Petro Ninja. Reach out for demo here.