The Foothills fold and thrust belt of the Canadian Rocky Mountains covers 40,000 square miles from just inside the Northwest Territories and Yukon Territory, southeast through British Columbia and Alberta to the US border. The Foothills has already provided 40 Tcf of in-place gas reserves and has the potential to provide a further 27 Tcf. It lies adjacent to and with in easy reach of the pipelines and other infrastructure of the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin.
This tectonic domain was created by horizontal compression, and two types of structures are produce. First, reservoir rocks are fault-repeated and stacked on top of each other, and fields in this type have multiple, stacked individual hydrocarbon pools. Second, strata are deformed into tight folds and are naturally fractured, greatly enhancing permeability.
Hydrocarbons occur throughout the stratigraphic column from the Cretaceous sandstones to the Devonian reefal carbonates. The Mississippian accounts for 26 Tcf, Triassic and Devonian 6 Tcf each, and the Cretaceous 2 Tcf of reserves.
Using a discovery history process model it is predicted that there is 27 Tcf to be discovered. All three of the largest pools in the WCSB will be in the Foothills and greater than 1 Tcf.
Lastly, industry could add an additional 10 Tcf to the marketable gas of the existing fields through an increased understanding of the naturally fractured reservoirs.