Tuesday, June 05, 2012

BlackPearl applies for big Blackrod oil sands project, aren't real pirates

The logo the company should
have used but, inexplicably,
didn't.
BlackPearl, a smallish Calgary heavy oil and oil sands company, has applied for an 80,000 barrels per day project in its Blackrod area. The first phase aims to produce 20,000 barrels per day and start production in around 2016 at a cost of $700 to $800 million.



It's not really clear if they have applied for the full 80,000 bbl/day development or just phase 1. The company has operated a pilot in the property for 10 months, apparently at "more than 400 barrels per day" over the last quarter. How many wells are operated in the pilot is not given, nor are the steam oil ratios or other important details.

I had at first assumed (or hoped) the company was named after the famous fictional pirate ship and that the founders were in fact buccaneers from the nearby Saskatchewan river. Unfortunately, the name actually comes out of the founding merger of BlackCore Resources and Pearl Resources. This created an adorable portmanteau and, perhaps, helped to gloss over sharper recollections that BlackCore made its anchor money selling Shell a bunch of dud properties, including Orion, for $2.4 billion in 2006. Scallywags? Probably. Pirates? Sadly not.

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