Cardium update – Top wells, most active companies and areas of interest – BOE Intel

This BOE Intel report will take a look at activity and production results from the Cardium over the last five years. We have analyzed well data since the beginning of 2018 to determine trends in industry activity levels, as well as who is drilling the best Cardium wells and where those wells are. Our analysis has incorporated over 1,300 well spuds targeting the Cardium in that time.

Since the beginning of 2018, Peyto Exploration has drilled the most Cardium wells with 189 spuds, followed closely by Whitecap Resources and Bonterra Energy. The rest of the list is below:

While the number of wells drilled by industry fell off a cliff during the Covid crash, Cardium activity has since recovered quite well, with 2022 spuds being the highest since 2018.

For production results, we decided to look at the Top 50 Cardium Oil Wells based on an IP12 month basis. Basically which Cardium wells produced the most oil over a 12 month period. Usually our TOP WELL REPORTS have analyzed monthly production rates, but shallower and lower cost plays like the Cardium will almost never make that list. Also, a full year of production will give us a better sense of which Cardium wells really have been the best. Of course many of the newer spuds will not have 12 months of production results and so will not be well represented on this list.

To see them all on a map on Petro Ninja, along with their production results, click the link below:

TOP 50 CARDIUM OIL WELLS (see on map)

Some interesting observations come out of this data:

Whitecap had the most wells show up in the Top 50 with 13. Interestingly, 9 of those wells came from the Wapiti area, which has not seen as much Cardium drilling by other companies.
Despite only 104 spuds out of over 1300 analyzed, the Wapiti field produced 13 of the top 50 Cardium oil wells. There certainly seems to be a sweet spot up there that Whitecap and Tourmaline have targeted.
Tourmaline had 4 wells on the list, with all of them coming from the Wapiti field.
TAQA North Ltd. had 2 of the top 3 Cardium oil wells.
7 of the top 11 Cardium oil wells came from the Ferrier field.
Yangarra Resources had 6 of the top 24 Cardium oil wells.
Orlen Upstream had 7 Cardium oil wells falling in the top 33.
While we have just taken a look at the top Cardium oil wells for this analysis, it should be noted that many companies target the Cardium for natural gas. The top 50 Cardium gas wells (not shown here) are strongly represented by Peyto (18 wells) and Tourmaline (16 wells).