Commercial bitumen production from Alberta’s vast resources locked in carbonate rock is inching closer to reality, and once that oil starts flowing successfully, there is plenty of it in the ground to maintain the pace. Using 1,330 wells within the study area, the latest assessment by Alberta’s Energy Resources Conservation Board boosted the province’s carbonate bitumen resources by 28 per cent to 406 billion barrels. The resource was last assessed in 1990, then pegged at 318 billion barrels. 

So why is this important? Because none of Alberta’s oilsands production currently comes from carbonates–rather, the in situ volumes come from clastic rock systems. 

“Although there is no shortage of bitumen in the clastics, the impressive amount of bitumen contained within the carbonate deposits has led a number of companies to begin the process of exploring and initiating projects,” Raymond James analysts Justin Bouchard and Christopher Cox wrote in a recent research note. “Unlike sandstone reservoirs that have well developed correlations for porosity, permeability, and other properties, the pore systems of carbonate rocks are very difficlut to characterize and the correlations applied to traditional sandstones simply don’t work.” 

There were some pilot projects in the 1970s and 1980s, they note, “some good, others not so good.” But, there’s a lot of hope for the future. 

“We’ve known about the bitumen bearing carbonates in Alberta for over 50 years,” wrote Bouchard and Cox. “And in actuality, over 70 per cent of the world’s oil is produced from carbonate reservoirs…the bottom line is that the carbonates themselves are nothing new–what is new or rather renewed–is a push to commercialize some of the deposits by the likes of Shell, Husky, Suncor, Osum and Laricina, among others.”

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Watch out for major carbonate developments in the near term.