Alberta Geological Survey

Oil Production from the Permian

Oil production from the Permian is relatively minor in amount, and occurs primarily in the Peace River Block of northeast B.C. and scattered through west-central Alberta. There are only eleven Permian oil fields, and of these, only four have Initial Established Recoverable Oil Reserves of over 1 x 10⁶m³ (6 MMBbls). Data on these four largest Permian oil fields are shown in Table 1.

Cumulative production data for Alberta and British Columbia are updated to the end of 1990.

Table 1 - Largest Permian Oil Fields (in units of 10⁶m³)

Initial Established

No.	Field	Formation	No. of Pools	Marketable Reserves	In-place Volume	Cumulative Production	Discovery Year
1	Eagle West	Belloy	1	7.3	23.5	4.9	1976
2	Virginia Hills	Belloy	2	3.8	10.3	3.2	1961
3	Eagle	Belloy-Kiskt	1	1.8	8.6	1.1	1972
4	Stoddart West	Belloy	3	1.3	8.6	1.0	1970

The Eagle West, Eagle and Stoddart West fields in B.C. are found in structural-stratigraphic traps related to facies changes adjacent to fault-bounded structures in the Peace River Embayment. The Virginia Hills field in Alberta occurs in a Belloy sandstone outlier south of the Peace River Embayment. All Permian oil production contains light to medium gravity oil.

Total recoverable oil reserves in the Permian are estimated at 14.7x 10⁶m³, of which 104x 10⁶m³(i.e. 71%) have already been produced. Initial Established In-Place Volume of Permian oil reserves totals 55.5 x 10⁶m³. There are 22 Permian oil pools in 11 fields, with an average 668 x 10³m³ recoverable oil reserves/pool. Table 2 lists the distribution of Permian oil reserves according to In-Place Pool Size.

Table 2 - Size Distribution of Permian Oil Pools (in units of 10⁶m³)

In-Place Pool Size Class	No. of Pools	Recoverable Reserves	Cumulative Production
less than 0.1	8	0.03	0.02
0.1 to 1	9	0.43	0.19
1.0 to 10	3	3.15	2.07
10.0 to 100	2	11.08	8.14
over 100	-	-	-
Total	22	14.69 x 106m3	10.42 x 106m3