Directive 065: Resources Applications for Oil and Gas Reservoirs ...

If the ownership within a holding is uncommon but all owners (both lessors and lessees) have
agreed to work within the terms of the current holding, the ownership is considered to be
common for the purposes of a holding. Such agreements are handled by the mineral owners
and are dealt with outside of ERCB procedures. Mineral owners are responsible for managing
these agreements to mitigate any potential risk of noncompliance.
All well spacing applications to establish or modify holdings require a Declaration of
Common Ownership attachment (see Appendix N).
To prepare for the possibility of an audit, the working interest owner who filed a spacing
application must keep a record of the mineral ownership information at the time of
application. This information would include
• the lessee map,
• the lessor map, and
• the industry notification list
Templates for this information can be found in Appendix K. Applications that include
evidence of common ownership other than the required Declaration of Common Ownership
form will be closed except where that information has been specifically requested by the
ERCB for an application.
7.2.5 Spacing and Horizontal/Multilateral Wells
The productive part of a horizontal wellbore in each DSU is considered a wellbore for the
purpose of Section 4.021(1) of the OGCR. The productive part of a wellbore is the portion
open to the producing zone or formation/pool. Each leg of a multilateral horizontal well
counts as a wellbore, as shown in Figure 7.3.
If any productive portion of the horizontal wellbore is off target, the entire horizontal well is
considered off target and a penalty may be applied to the well’s total production.
A horizontal well may be drilled across adjacent DSUs that have common mineral rights
ownership at both the lessor and lessee levels or if a pooling agreement between the lessee(s)
and lessor(s) is in place, as shown in Figure 7.4. In such cases, a spacing application is not
required as long as the well density does not exceed the current baseline well density.
The example in Figure 7.3 shows two lateral legs and one vertical leg producing within a
DSU. Assuming that all legs are producing from the same pool, this DSU would have three
producing wells.
ERCB Directive 065: Resources Applications / Application for Special Well Spacing (October 2011) • 7-5