50 Years - Wildcat Hills Gas Plant Traditional Cache
50 Years - Wildcat Hills Gas Plant
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(micro)
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This cache has been placed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of of the Wildcat Hills gas plant. It is a micro, so bring your own pencil!
There is a convenient highway pullout near the cache. It is best accessed when travelling westbound. Please do not drive past the pullout area and onto the grass along the fence.
Congrats to The Chalk Giants for FTF!!
(visit link)
The Wildcat Hills natural gas processing plant began operations 50 years ago at 8:00 AM on January 1, 1962. It was constructed by Petro Fina Canada with partners including Imperial Oil, Shell Canada and Hudson’s Bay Oil and Gas. Petro Canada purchased Petro Fina Canada from its Belgian owners in 1981 and took over operatorship. Petro Canada subsequently acquired the working interests of Imperial Oil, Norwest (Norcen) and Talisman until it owned two thirds of the plant and gas field by the mid 1990’s. Suncor acquired Petro Canada in 2009 and, through a series of asset sales, sold Wildcat Hills to Direct Energy in 2010, the current owner and operator. Direct Energy also purchased Shell Canada’s one third interest and then owned 100% of the Wildcat Hills plant and field. Direct Energy then changed Wildcat Hills' named ownership to that of its master, Centrica Energy. Centrica has subsequently sold 40% of each of Wildcat Hills and the rest of its Canadian operations to Qatar Petroleum.
Centrica head office in Great Britain has declared its Canadian operations to be 'non-core', so if you want to buy a few gas plants including Wildcat Hills, make them an offer!
The Wildcat Hills discovery well was drilled in 1957, and the original field now extends 20 kilometres to the Northwest. The plant was initially filled to its capacity of 110 million standard cubic feet per day (MMSCFD) by only six wells. Infill drilling continued until 1980 at which time 20 wells had been drilled to fully develop the Wildcat Hills pool. This gas reservoir originally contained 1.2 trillion cubic feet of gas, of which about 900 billion to 1 trillion cubic feet will eventually be recovered. The gas is produced from the Mississippian Turner Valley formation of the Paleozoic age. It is the same rock as the mountians you can see to the west, but here these `mountains` are about 3000m below where you are standing!
Additional exploration was conducted by Petro Canada in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s and discovered an additional 1 trillion cubic feet of gas in place in the Turner Valley and Viking formations. The resulting production rates were too large to be processed at the Wildcat Hills plant alone, so the gathering system was expanded to interconnect with the Shell Jumping Pound plant to the South, and Shell’s Burnt timber, Husky’s Ram River and Keyera’s Strachan gas plants to the North.
The Wildcat Hills gas plant has now processed about 1 trillion cubic feet of gas over the past 50 years, and has almost 100 wells able to flow to it. The tight nature of the rock formations will only slowly release the remaining gas reserves, and will require plant operations to continue for several more decades.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
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