History

The original founder and Chairman of Rallyemont is S.P. (Steve) Halabura, a professional geologist with 30 years of expertise on Saskatchewan’s sub surface mineral resources and who directed the exploration team to the heavy oil properties. Steve has direct heavy oil exploration experience in west central Saskatchewan as a consulting geologist during the early 1980’s under the Saskatchewan Heavy Oil Exploration Program. During that time, Steve was working on the drilling rigs as a consulting geologist for large oil companies, which were being subsidized to explore for heavy oil in Saskatchewan.

Steve notes that:

“Lots of heavy oil was found in the Province, which now is home to over 22 billion barrels, but much of it was too heavy, or viscous to produce with conventional primary production methods, (ie: “pumps”). So given the technology at the time, companies were unable to extract the oil economically. Then came the National Energy Program (“NEP”), which halted the exploration. The NEP, coupled with weak heavy oil price differentials, caused exploration and interest in Saskatchewan heavy oil to vanish. Since then, it’s not just people that have migrated to Alberta, but so too has capital directed toward the oil sands. Saskatchewan heavy oil for the last 25 plus years has been over looked, but now the demand for heavy oil is strong, highlighted by strong price differentials, and in-situ EOR technologies have been developed and evolved enough where companies such as CNRL, Husky, Petrobank, etc. are applying them in west central Saskatchewan just like they have in the northern oil sands.”

Since May 2009, Rallyemont, along with its technical partners, have commenced a strategic exploration program aimed at tracking the sub surface “sand channels” saturated with heavy oil in west central Saskatchewan. The main objective of the exploration program was to use the Saskatchewan Government’s historic geological data base of drill holes and logs to identify focus areas. Each focus area would need to be a contiguous parcel of land that contained roughly 100 million barrels of oil that met certain geological criteria such as certain pay and saturation. A focus area would therefore need to meet these stringent criteria so as to justify commercial EOR development that could potentially produce upwards of 10,000 barrels per day or more.