Consultant promoting shale oil drilling in New Orleans
STEPHENVILLE
FRANK GALE
The Western Star

Jack McCracken, president and geologist with Egret Consulting, is hoping he made some inroads in relation to the Shoal Point oil play while attending a conference in New Orleans.

In a telephone interview Wednesday, he indicated he had spoken twice about the Green Point shale play while representing Shoal Point Energy at the annual convention for the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.

This conference had between 4,000 to 5,000 delegates but has gone up to 9,000 in the past. At each of his presentations there were about 100 delegates in attendance and included people from all over the world.

“There seemed to be a lot of interest on my subject of getting oil on a shale versus deriving gas on a shale. In the past five to six years there has been a growing interest into drilling into shale,” he said.

McCracken explained new technology has made it easier to extract gas and oil from shale; however, the success rate was so great with retrieving gas that it has basically driven the cost of gas down.

“A lot of companies are now focusing on getting liquids out of the shale and there is good geochemical evidence from our analysis of the shale at the Green Point location that it is oil prone,” he said.
“I think our presence here helped with some positive thoughts of this play. The thing I like most about this play is if you have oil seeps nearby, it’s a good thing and there are lots of oil seeps around that bay. There was drilling done there about 100 years ago and reports of 10 to 20 barrels of oil a day for a period of time, which is encouraging,” he said.

With the early production, the seeps and oil discovered in the Green Point formation when they drilled back in 2008, he is hoping the drilling slated for June of this year will produce oil in a significant enough discovery for the government to grant a licence to commence production.

Canadian Imperial Venture Corp., in conjunction with partners Shoal Point Energy Ltd. and McLaren Resources Ltd. announced this week it is hoping to commence drilling at Shoal Point by June 15