Five billion barrels of oil in five years, unrisked. That’s the goal, according to the CEO of the Petroleum Technology Research Centre, Dan Maclean.

Maclean was the speaker at a breakfast event held by the Weyburn Chamber of Commerce this morning. It was a packed house in the Vimy Room at the Royal Canadian Legion for the event, ‘Handshakes and Hashbrowns’.

Chamber president Twila Walkeden said she was happy with the turnout for the event.

"I was very pleased with the turnout, I was very pleased with the content of the presentation," she said. "He was very skillful and he has a lot of passion associated with his position, so certainly, we had some great feedback from our chamber members."

Maclean said Saskatchewan currently produces 480,000 barrels of oil a day. In one year, that’s roughly 175 million barrels, which is nowhere near a billion barrels per year.

“The goal is to invest in research and technology that can help to develop that kind of research potential,” said Maclean. “So, on the heavy oil side, we think there's about a billion barrels of incremental recovery that could be identified or produced from new technologies, that we are working with producers like Husky, Devon and CNRL on, and that kind of research is a continuum."

He said a big part of reaching their goal is investing in developing new technologies to help oil companies implement enhanced recovery schemes.

“A successful oil company, for every barrel that they produce, they have to find another barrel of oil,” he explained. “It's like shopping in a grocery store. If you're not replenishing the shelves, you're going out of business. So, year over year, companies are drilling wells, or they're implementing an enhanced recovery scheme to identify a new reserve barrel that they've just produced. So we're part of that process.”

He said if the process is successful, and oil companies were able to implement the strategies across a large spectrum of their assets, that could potentially unlock the one billion barrels of reserves.

But five years, of course, refers only to locating the reserves.

“The reserves themselves could be identified over the next 5 years, but it may take 20 years to produce them. That's how that reserve concept works,” he said.

The PTRC is a not-for-profit founded in 1998 by the Government of Canada and the Government of Saskatchewan. It is a collaborative partnership with industry, government and research organizations. Core areas of research include Weyburn CO2 and EOR, Aquistore, CO2 storage (Boundary Dam Estevan), Heavy Oil, and Tight/Light Oil (Viewfield, Viking, Shaunavon, Williston Basin).

The research objectives of the PTRC include increasing provincial incremental oil and gas reserves, growing the membership of the organization, expanding the scope of what the group does and who does it, expanding the organization's access to funding, as well as building collaboration and relationship with key stakeholders. They also aim to support projects aligned with reducing greehouse gas emissions, fresh water usage, energy usage and surface footprint.