Spudding Collaboration: PTAC's Role In Canadian Natural Gas Resource Development
Authors: Gaudet D. , Overend B. 
Published: March 2010

Created in 1996, the Petroleum Technology Alliance Canada (PTAC) has sought to bring a collaborative approach to technology development and deployment. Several factors have contributed to the surge in development of natural gas from coal in Canada since 2003, but underlying them all was the collaborative groundwork, information exchange, and research commitments fostered years earlier. Continued efficient natural gas development will depend on a future fueled by entrepreneurial initiative, but ably backstopped by the collaborative ethos.

Introduction

There is no doubting the need to make the development of Canada's natural gas resources more efficient. Once a resource that seemed practically limitless, Canada's conventional natural gas production is suddenly well beyond its peak. The easy gas is going, going, gone. Increasingly, our natural gas is found in difficult- to-produce rock formations requiring special completion, stimulation, or production techniques to achieve economic production. On the demand side, gas is gas is gas: it all commands the same market price. But on the supply side, we're counting on economic recovery of natural gas from coal beds, tight sands, and organic shales to supplement conventional reserves. Further, we'll be dependent on the viability of natural gas recovery in the harshest of environments: the Mackenzie Delta and the East Coast offshore, to name just two.

This challenge lands on our lap at a moment in time when Canadian research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) efforts cannot be described as auspicious. Over the years, technology has earned a stellar track record in oil and gas, and Canadians have shown leadership in the deployment of petroleum technology. Our successful development of Alberta's oil sands, and our progress in the Arctic prior to Justice Berger's recommendation of a moratorium on pipeline construction(1), are two outstanding examples. But since the late 1980s, private and public sector R&D funding, particularly in conventional oil and gas exploration and production, has been in the doldrums. In a period when economic activity in the sector expanded threefold, R&D investment from private and public sources dropped by two-thirds; the victim of several factors including the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin's "harvest" mentality as well as merciless commodity price-driven activity cycles(2).

Vice-Presidents With a Mission

Enter a group of industry vice-presidents on a mission. The Vice Presidents Breakfast Club, an informal Calgary-based organization of senior executives from two dozen oil and gas companies, broached the R&D issue in 1994 and concluded that a new model was required in the Canadian industry(3). Believing that technology development would greatly benefit from collaboration, the VPs commissioned a study to examine the topic in detail. One of the day's most respected authorities on exploration and production, Murray Todd, took the pulse of industry and delivered a report highly supportive of collaborative technology development. Wrote Todd: "There is general agreement among the people involved in this study on the principal characteristics of a new collaborative research model.