Slow start for oilsands leases
Posted Mar 4, 2015 7:15 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Despite plummeting oil prices, it doesn’t look like companies are flocking to give up their oilsands leases; however, the early numbers for 2015 don’t paint a rosy picture.
In the first month of this year, when oil was going for $47 a barrel, the province leased a little more than 3500 hectares of oilsands land, and made just $140,000.
Compare that to the same time last year when oil was more than $93 a barrel: the province leased close to 7,000 hectares and made almost $1.3-million.
Deborah Jaremko, Editor of Oilsands Revue Magazine, explains once a company leases land, there are systems in place to make sure companies don’t just sit on it.
“They have to do a certain amount of work; whether that’s delineation, drilling, seismic, or you know, other sort of work they have to show essentially they’re planning to develop those leases within a certain time frame,” she said.
She says if that doesn’t happen the lease goes back to the crown.
As for the companies which have chosen to give up their leases, Jeremko says they’re smaller companies which lack the finances to work marginal leases where the technology perhaps hasn’t been developed to make them viable.
