Rondeau and the Gas Industry/Sinclair Field

Province of Manitoba | News Releases

Provincial initiatives to spur oil investment include:
· a retail sales tax exemption for drilling and service rigs and other equipment used for oil and gas exploration, and
· a change in the Manitoba Drilling Incentive Program to encourage investment in water-flood projects in which salt water is re-injected into oil pools to increase oil recovery.

The future also looks promising for Sinclair field, Manitoba’s newest and most significant oil field, said Rondeau. Last year 304 wells were drilled in Sinclair. The field now accounts for more than 30 per cent of the province’s total oil production. A new 18-kilometre pipeline now carries more than 7,500 barrels of crude oil per day from the Sinclair field to Cromer where it enters the Enbridge interprovincial pipeline system.

South-Western Manitoba

Fracking is also in high demand in the Bakken natural gas field in southern Saskatchewan, where 1,000 wells have been drilled and fracked over the past five years. PSAC is predicting 1,935 new wells will be drilled there in 2010, and 300 new wells in Manitoba.

As a result, Alberta has just announced that it is removing environmental and regulatory "hurdles" in order to entice the natural-gas industry back.

Huge shale developments are also planned for Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. The Utica shale gas play in Quebec covers an area of 5,000 square kilometres that runs along the St. Lawrence River from Montreal to Quebec City