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Globe and Mail, Canada --
May 23, 2005
Startup aims to feast
on the scraps
Junior company hears opportunity knock from some of
Alberta's oldest oil fields
By PATRICK BRETHOUR
Monday, May 23, 2005
CALGARY -- Troy Bilon is looking to get rich on
leftovers.
The 32-year-old Calgary geologist is eyeing the
supposedly passé part of Alberta's oil patch,
conventional oil wells whose production has been in
decline since the year he was born.
But he is hoping that new technology, and the new era of
higher energy prices, spell new opportunity for those
who are willing to take up the slack left as the
industry's biggest players head abroad or north to the
oil sands. "They're leaving this wedge for smaller
companies like us to come in and play that role," says
Mr. Bilon, president of Core Exploration Ltd. -- which
has just one other employee at the moment.
Mr. Bilon is starting small, no doubt, but he has big
plans. He says he is examining three properties in
west-central and central Alberta, looking to see which
ones have the most potential for enhanced oil recovery
techniques, including the flooding of reservoirs with
carbon dioxide.
Much depends on whether there is a substantial supply of
carbon dioxide.
Mr. Bilon is all too aware of that fact, and of the
irony that the Kyoto Protocol may be one of his biggest
allies in pushing the wider industry to capture and then
sell its output of greenhouse gases.
Billions of barrels could be extracted from some of
Alberta's oldest oil fields using that technology,
although in many cases the amount from any particular
well is relatively small. And that is the foundation of
Mr. Bilon's plans for Core Exploration.
Where the major companies may sneer to tread, Core will
happily go, since a few thousand or even a few hundred
barrels of production will make a huge difference to a
junior company with no output at all right now.
"I think the big guys are too big to care," he says.
Within five years, Mr. Bilon hopes that Core will be
pumping out oil "that's already there" and will have
become the only publicly traded junior entirely focused
on enhanced oil recovery. In short, Core will have grown
fat feasting on leftovers.
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