Maidstone– Baytex Energy Corp. has been a key player in the Maidstone oilpatch, with its Soda Lake field southwest of the community seeing active drilling during the winter season.
One drilling rig has been punching holes this past winter, increasing the area’s production with promising wells.
Pipeline Newsvisited the operation on Feb. 21, meeting with Paul Lawrence, Baytex Energy Corp.’s field superintendent in the company’s Soda Lake field, Brian Blanchette, HSE advisor for Saskatchewan, and Andrew Loosley, Baytex’s director of stakeholder relations. He flew out from Calgary to take part in the tour.
Lawrence was working with Dorset when Baytex bought them out in 1997. He’s seen the ups and the downs. He noted that the Maidstone-area field was one of Baytex’s initial forays, and they bought it right when the oilpatch was at a crawl. “It went down to US$7 a barrel, and things stopped,” he said of the industry.
While he’s got 20 years in with Baytex, Lawrence is far from the exception.
“Right now, probably everybody is longterm,” Lawrence said. One person is around three years, but “the rest of us are well over 10 years.”
That includes their contract operators.
There are seven total field operator runs supporting the Soda Lake operation, with 14 field operators, an electrician, a general maintenance person, two battery operators and two administrators. In total they look after about 250 wells. Production is coming up due to Baytex’s drilling program in the area. While they won’t say the numbers, Lawrence said, “The wells we are drilling are very good.”
Loosley added, “These are some of the best wells we have in our portfolio. This is an important area for Baytex for growth.”
Baytex has a sand retention pit, administered by NewAlta, near Carruthers. (Full disclosure: the writer used to run an excavator for a subcontractor in that pit for a year around 2002. He only got the excavator stuck to the top of the counterweight once, but Lawrence and Blanchette still remember the additional excavator and dozer coming in to dig it out.)
“There was lots of sand at that time. Tons of it… We don’t handle near as much sand as we used to,” Lawrence said.
The Baytex Soda Lake field is approximately 13 kilometres east-west, and 16 kilometres north-south, between Highway 16 and the Battle River. It straddles Highway 21, with the bulk being on the west side of the highway.
The Soda Lake field is being developed with horizontal, multilateral wells, with a vertical depth of about 700 metres.
The company’s March 7 press release noted, “At Soda Lake, we have drilled six of eight multi-lateral horizontal wells planned for the first quarter of 2017 (16 multi-lateral horizontal wells are planned for the full-year). Depending on the overall length and completion, well costs range from $700,000 to $900,000 with an average 30-day initial production rate of approximately 130 bpd. Through efficient operational execution and lower service costs, the cost to drill, complete and equip our first six multi-lateral wells have come in approximately 15 per cent below budget with 30-day initial production rates either meeting or exceeding expectations. Our most recent two wells are expected to generate 30-day initial production rates of approximately 175 bpd.”
Lawrence said, “Back in the day, when Baytex took over, they were drilling horizontal wells with one leg. As Baytex has done their homework, they’re drilling multilaterals. We’ll see, here, two to four out of one well.”
Loosely noted that other areas will see as many as 13 legs. One at Peace River has 16 legs.
Thousand-metre lengths are pretty normal for legs. There are some 1,600 metre legs.
“We’ve developed the technology and expertise in-house,” Loosley said.
“We’ve got the right sand base to not case them,” Lawrence said, adding there’s not a lot of sand being produced. “This Soda Lake area never saw a lot of sand. It was more of Carruthers-south.”
A land-swap with Husky resulted in that southern land going to Husky.
“The new wells, the guys are seeing 0.1 per cent sand,” Lawrence said.
Lawrence pointed out that CHOPS (cold heavy oil production with sand) is not their standard technique. “There are so many new ideas. We’re using waterflood EOR. That’s the next step.”
The mineral rights are nearly all held by the Crown.
The oil is 12 to 13 API, making it pretty thick.
Artificial lift is handled with progressing cavity pumps to surface tanks, although they are testing a few electric submersible pumps in a progressing cavity configuration. Continuous rod is the norm. Most of the field’s product is trucked to the central Soda Lake battery, but their waterflood area has sufficient volumes of water that they can pipeline it into the battery. The produced water is then returned to the field for waterflood purposes.
Otherwise there are numerous trucks that are a constant flow in and out. Baytex is a rarity in having its own, in-house trucking company that does the hauling, Aim Transport. Roughly 40 per cent of their volumes are pipelined into the battery, and the remainder is trucked.
The field is dominated by single well batteries, but there are some six-well pads. These days, two-well pads are common for new sites.
In addition to the primary battery at 2-36-46-24-W3, they have a smaller battery in the area that does quite a bit less volume.
The Soda Lake battery itself has a large treater and a smaller test treater. There are two free water knockouts that handle about 90 per cent of the separation. In the last two years they’ve added a vapour recovery system.
“All the oil is trucked out of here,” Lawrence said.
The roads have dramatically improved in the years since Baytex first moved into the Soda Lake field. Lawrence jokes that sometimes truckers would take the ditch instead, they were so bad. But that’s not the case now, as Highway 21 was re-aligned and improved about 15 years ago.
There is no sales pipeline from Soda Lake. The finished product goes by truck to Repsol at Chauvin, Alta. From there it goes to Hardisty where it enters the mainline pipeline network.
“We know all the landowners,” said Blanchette, adding they will often call in directly if they have an issue to be dealt with.
Baytex supports multiple scholarships in local schools, as well as clubs and sports like skating and hockey. The local hospital is also a regular recipient of support.
Loosley said, “Our focus is our people in the field.”
