Heating Up in Icy Waters

Abstract

It was an area once thought to be the last untapped jewel in the hunt for hydrocarbons in the Great White North—a frontier of equal parts promise and peril. The lure of massive oil deposits lurking miles below its icy waters had operators taking a hard look at offshore Eastern Canada as far back as the late 1960s; however initial production from the area—Cohasset-Panuke off Nova Scotia—did not begin until 1992. Logistical challenges related to the remote area and the lack of existing infrastructure made bringing on new production in the region an expensive proposition. The discovered fields would need to be sizable to warrant the required investment. After decades of fits and starts, offshore Eastern Canada has yielded just a handful of major developments, with the best of those facing their own sets of challenges. Newfoundland and Labrador’s Terra Nova, the first development in North America to use floating production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) technology in a harsh-weather environment featuring sea ice and icebergs, came on line in 2002, but has been suspended for the past 3 years due to issues with the vessel. White Rose, another FPSO-based development, came on stream in late 2005 via subsea wells tied back to the SeaRose vessel. After successful completion of one expansion project in the 2010s, a further expansion—West White Rose—was planned but halted in 2020 due to unfavorable oil markets caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The project envisaged a wellhead platform supported by a concrete gravity structure (CGS) and topsides. The platform will produce back to the SeaRose FPSO. Cenovus approved the restart of the project in May 2022. The West White Rose project is expected to increase the production life of the field by 14 years. Newfoundland and Labrador’s landmark oil production platform Hibernia became the first to produce oil in the province just over 25 years ago. As of August 2022, the project has produced more than 1.2 billion bbl of oil from the field, with almost 580 million bbl remaining proven and possible reserves. The region’s newest producer is the ExxonMobil-operated Hebron. First oil from the field was produced in November 2017—37 years after the field’s discovery by former operator Chevron. Plans to develop the field were shelved in the early 2000s only to be revived later in the decade. As a result of production interruptions and project delays, overall production trends in the region have been on the decline since the end of 2019 (Fig. 1). Off Nova Scotia, both ExxonMobil’s Sable Offshore Energy Project and Ovintiv’s (formerly Encana) Deep Panuke produced commercially for a combined 24 years (19 and 5, respectively) before each was abandoned and decommissioned in 2018. However, the outlook for offshore Eastern Canada today is somewhat brighter.