(Photo supplied: An illustration of the SAGD process. Suncor / WEB)
Suncor is banking on what it calls a “replication” strategy for in-situ developments to help lower costs as it tries to grapple with low oil prices.
“The reason we call it the replication strategy is we’re trying to come up with exactly the same designed plants. So we’re looking for pockets of resource where we could have identical plants put down to drive down the costs,” said Mark Little, Executive Vice-President, Upstream.
One of the first in-situ projects will be the long shelved Meadow Creek East development just 20 km’s southwest of Anzac.
The joint venture with Nexen Energy ULC is expected to produce up to 80,000 barrels per day (bbl/d).
That’s just one of a number of smaller projects the company hopes to bring online that when combined could produce up to 250,000 bbl/d.
“The resource is there, we’re trying to figure out how to bring it to market in a less costly manner,” said Little. “We’ve identified nine different pockets that range between 400-600 million barrels with our current program.”
Suncor will submit an updated application for the Meadow Creek East project this year.
