Data through … · build …
sagd.app maps the thermal in-situ oil sands and heavy-oil projects of Alberta and Saskatchewan: who runs each one, what it produces, the steam it takes, and where its pads and wells sit. Every figure comes from a public record and a stated rule. Each topic below opens with the short answer.
sagd.app covers the thermal in-situ oil sands and heavy-oil projects of Alberta and Saskatchewan, most of them steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD), a few cyclic steam stimulation (CSS). Each project breaks down into areas, pads and wells; on a SAGD project the wells work in pairs, one injecting steam above one producing below. At every level sagd.app reports three quantities: the bitumen produced, the steam injected, and the steam-oil ratio (SOR), the barrels of steam it takes to lift one barrel of bitumen, which is the industry's measure of thermal efficiency. Two dates stand behind the figures. The display month is the latest month of reported production, printed beside every rate. The filing year is the year of the operator's latest annual performance presentation, which supplies the pad names, the drainage patterns and the recovery figures.
Canada, then a province, a company, a project, its areas, its pads, and a pad's pairs or wells. A company is its current owner: projects that changed hands are grouped under the company that holds them now, under its current name. Areas group a project's pads the way the operator's own records do: development areas, plants or pattern groups.
Each project reads at its own display month: the latest month in which both its project-level series and its Petrinex well records report. The project-level series is the AER's ST53 for Alberta and Petrinex for Saskatchewan, so Alberta usually reads a month behind Saskatchewan. A project with no well records takes its series' latest month. A total across projects names the span of its members' months, for example "May–Jun".
When a project's display month falls more than 25% below the median of its previous six months (at least three of them reported), the month is treated as a turnaround: the headline rate becomes the day-weighted average of the last three months instead of the single dip.
A project whose latest reading is more than 6 months behind the newest reading anywhere in sagd.app shows no current rate and no cSOR, and drops out of every total. The cutoff is measured from the data's own newest month, never today's calendar date, so a late month of reporting never empties the map.
The formation under a project's name is quoted from its filings in Alberta and from the Saskatchewan well records' completion formations, naming every member above a 5% share. Three Athabasca projects whose filings name no producing formation read "McMurray Fm (deposit region)", a geographic basis kept separate from the quoted ones; a project with neither reads "formation not stated".
Formulas and current coverage: Appendix.
Four public records supply the production, the wells and the projects. Three more supply the rest: Alberta's royalty data gives operating cost and netback, the federal greenhouse-gas reporting program gives carbon intensity, and the Canada Energy Regulator gives export pipeline capacities. Nothing comes from private data, and nothing is estimated where a record gives the answer.
| Source | What it gives | How current | Known gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Petrinex | Monthly bitumen, steam and water, well by well, Alberta and Saskatchewan | Monthly, a few months behind | Well-level history starts in January 2022 |
| AER ST53 | Each Alberta project's monthly totals and its producing well count | Monthly, from 2017 | Alberta only; Saskatchewan has no project-level equivalent |
| Operators' annual performance presentations | Pad names, drainage patterns, recovery, development areas, plans | Yearly, filed to the AER under Directive 054 | Alberta only; a few projects file none |
| AER well licences (ST37) | Every well's licence, surface location and surveyed bottomhole | Current list | No public bottomhole survey for Saskatchewan |
The provinces' shared volumetric reporting system: each well's and each facility's monthly bitumen, steam injected, water and fuel gas, in cubic metres, as the operator files it. sagd.app holds the well records from January 2022 for both provinces. Pads, areas and pairs are built from these records; so are Saskatchewan's project totals, and every steam plant's fuel gas.
The Alberta Energy Regulator's monthly in-situ summary: each Alberta project's bitumen, steam and water, its steam-oil ratio, and on its wells sheet the operator's own count of producing and injecting wells. sagd.app holds it from 2017. A project's headline rate, its cSOR and its filed pair count come from here.
Every Alberta in-situ project presents its performance to the AER each year under Directive 054: pad and pattern names, drainage patterns, development areas, recovery by pattern, facilities, compliance, plans. Each figure taken from one carries its filing year and page. Saskatchewan has no equivalent filing, and two producing Alberta projects (Narrows Lake and Pike) have filed none, so those carry production only.
The AER's well list: each well's licence, name, status, surface location and on-production date, with the AER's bottomhole shapefile for the surveyed end of each Alberta well. The well names carry each operator's pad code and producer or injector role, which is how wells are grouped into pads and pairs.
Alberta Oil Sands Royalty Data (annual, by royalty project) for operating cost and netback; the federal Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (annual, by facility) for carbon intensity; the Saskatchewan Petroleum MapServer for Saskatchewan completion formations; the AER's pipeline licence file for every provincial pipeline; the Canada Energy Regulator's pipeline profiles for export capacities; OpenStreetMap for the export routes and the NGTL gas line; Natural Resources Canada and Indigenous Services Canada for reserve lands.
A rate is thousands of barrels of bitumen per day (kbpd) in the display month. A share is that rate as a percent of the level above it: a company's share of Canada or of its province, a project's share of its company, a pad's share of its project. The instantaneous SOR (iSOR) divides one month's steam by that month's bitumen; the cumulative SOR (cSOR) divides all the steam on record by all the bitumen on record. A pad's and a project's ratios are its own steam over its own bitumen; a company's cSOR averages its projects' cSORs weighted by what each produces, so the largest project counts most. SAGD is counted in well pairs and CSS in wells, because a CSS well injects and produces through the same bore. The smallest members of a level fold into "Others" so the bars stay readable, and recovery is the operator's own filed figure, a percent of the oil in place as that operator measures it.
A month's volume in cubic metres, divided by the days in the month, at 1 m³ = 6.2898 bbl; the options switch every figure to m³/d. CSV exports keep the filed m³, and a figure quoted from a filing keeps the unit it was filed in. A project's headline is its display-month rate, AER ST53 in Alberta; a turnaround month reads its three-month average instead (topic 1). Pads, areas and pairs are Petrinex at the same display month, so a pad that did not report that month shows no rate, and a project's pad table sums its Petrinex wells rather than the ST53 total (the difference is the subject of topic 4). A company, a province and Canada are the sums of their projects. Boxes and tables print whole kbpd, one decimal under 1.
Each box and each table row is a percent of its parent: an operator of the open region, a project of its company in that region, an area or a pad of its project, a pair of its pad. The project's own "of Canada" figure is always of Canada. Percents print whole from 1% up and with one decimal below it, never "1.0".
A project's cSOR is the sum of its monthly steam over the sum of its monthly bitumen across every month of its series: from 2017 for most Alberta projects, from January 2022 in Saskatchewan. A pad's, an area's and a pair's are the same sums over its Petrinex months, January 2022 to the display month, and their iSOR is the display month alone. A pair's steam is every well on the pair; its bitumen is every producing leg, re-drills included. A company's cSOR is the average of its projects' cSORs weighted by each project's current rate. Cyclic-steam pads carry no pad SOR; the project's cSOR covers them.
A well's role is read from the twelve months to the display month: a producer moved bitumen, an injector put steam in and moved none, an infill is a producer drilled between pairs with no injector of its own. On a cyclic-steam project every well is cyclic, and its phase this month is producing, injecting or idle. A pad's pairs column counts its distinct pairs and adds re-drill legs and infills after a plus sign ("12 + 1"). The project's filed count is the operator's own ST53 figure: well pairs on a SAGD project, producing wells on a CSS one (Cold Lake's 3,489 is wells). A filed count of zero beside a positive rate reads "—", since a producing project cannot have no producing wells; the zero is a reporting lag.
A pad is producing when its wells reported bitumen in the display month. "Of N on record" counts every current pad on the project; historical pads, whose wells stopped decades ago, sit below their own rule in the table and outside every count, share and rank.
A pad's or a pair's first Petrinex month with bitumen, when that falls after January 2022. Earlier starts read "pre-2022", from the AER's on-production date; Foster Creek's pairs carry that date by name. "Years" counts from first oil to the display month.
Within a company, the largest member wears the company colour and each smaller one steps toward a light neutral: the shade is rank, not a scale. Foster Creek's four named areas keep fixed tones. Operators under 5% of a region form one Other box when there are at least three; a company shows its five largest projects and folds the rest; areas and pads fold members under 1% of their parent when there are at least three; pairs never fold. A crowded pad level switches to circles. Every folded member keeps its true share inside Other and opens with a tap.
On a pad, the operator's filed recovery to date and its expected ultimate range, for the latest filed year, with the filing and page. The percent is of the in-place volume the operator reports for that pattern, and the basis differs by operator (OBIP, EBIP, PBIP and others, as each files it): the line names it, "recovered 18% of SOIP", so compare recovery on the same basis.
A comparison chart plots calendar months. First steam and First oil shift each line so that month 0 is its own start: the date its filing gives where one does, otherwise its first month with steam or bitumen in the records. A pad already steaming in January 2022, when the monthly well records start, has no known first-steam month, so it is not shifted: the chart draws it lighter at its calendar place and names it once under the legend.
The #N beside a project's figures ranks it across every project: production and the filed count high to low, cSOR low to high. Equal values share a rank and the next one skips (two at #1, then #3); a project without the figure ranks last. Ranks compare scale, so a young pilot ranks low on production by construction.
Operating cost and netback come from the royalty project matched to the project, per bitumen barrel, in Canadian dollars. Netback here is gross revenue less operating cost and royalty, per barrel: it leaves out diluent cost and other real costs, so it is not a corporate netback. A figure shows plain only when the royalty barrels and the project's own day-weighted annual production agree within 5% and the match is confident; otherwise it shows with a ⚠ naming the reason, and an operating cost outside 3–60 CAD/bbl, which means the royalty barrels themselves are not credible, shows "—". Carbon intensity is the facility's reported emissions over the project's annual bitumen barrels, flagged where the facility boundary takes in a cogeneration plant or other equipment.
Operating cost is reported for the project, never pad by pad. A pad's figure multiplies the project's own cost per barrel by the pad's barrels for the year, so every pad on a project carries the project's cost per barrel. It shows only for a pad that produced in that year, on a project whose own figure passes the check above.
Each steam plant's fuel gas as it reports it to Petrinex, the plants being the facilities that injected steam that month, in MMcf/d (m³/d × 35.3147 ÷ 10⁶) with the gas burned per cubic metre of steam beside it. Energy is the plant's own reported figure where it gives one, otherwise 37.8 MJ per cubic metre. Two plants inject steam and report no fuel; they read "fuel gas not reported at this facility" and nothing is estimated. Cogeneration is tagged where the operator's filing states it, because a cogeneration plant's gas also makes power.
Production is reported more than once, and the reports rarely match to the barrel. For every Alberta project sagd.app lines up four figures for the latest full year: the sum of its wells in Petrinex, the AER's project total, Alberta's royalty barrels and the operator's own stated average. Petrinex is the primary wherever it covers the year. Where the four agree within 5% the project is aligned. Where they do not, sagd.app names the reason it can prove — a royalty project drawn around a different boundary, a year not yet fully reported, a royalty barrel measured after cleaning rather than at the wellhead — and marks the rest unexplained rather than forcing a match. Saskatchewan projects have one source, Petrinex, and say so.
Petrinex: every well on the project, summed, as a day-weighted annual average. ST53: the project's own annual average, day-weighted over the months it reported. Royalty: Alberta's royalty barrels for the year over the days in the year. Stated: the operator's own annual average in its performance presentation. Each is a true annual average, never a December reading carried as the year.
Petrinex is the primary when it reports at least six months of the year, ST53 otherwise. Each other source's gap is its distance from the primary as a percent of the primary.
If every gap is within 5%, the project is aligned. Otherwise the largest gap is named. A royalty gap is a boundary where the royalty project is drawn around a different set of phases than the approval (its own note says which), and a basis difference otherwise: royalty barrels are cleaned bitumen at the royalty calculation point, not raw volumes at the wellhead. An ST53 gap is timing when Petrinex has fewer than ten months of the year, and unexplained otherwise. A gap to the operator's stated figure is unexplained. Saskatchewan projects have a single source; a project not yet producing has no data.
A project's pads are a subset of its wells, so their sum never exceeds the project's Petrinex total by more than 2% rounding. At the display month the pad table stays within 10% of the project's headline; Hangingstone and BlackGold sit outside that, because not all of their wells are attributed to pads yet.
Every project's class: Appendix, coverage.
Every shape on the map is drawn from a public record of where the wells are. A pad sits at the surface location its wells share. A pad's box is the ground its horizontal wells cover: the rectangle around each well's surveyed surface and bottomhole points, or the pattern the operator drew where it filed one. The lines inside it are those wells. The pipelines are the AER's licensed lines, chained into the trunk systems that carry bitumen out and diluent in; the four export corridors follow their real routes. A box shows where the wells run, not a modelled steam chamber, and sagd.app draws no net-pay or reservoir-quality map.
Circles: a project's surface marker. Size is bitumen production, colour is the operator.
Rectangles: drainage boxes, drawn from the wells' surveyed surface and bottomhole points, not filed geometry.
Thin lines inside a box: the horizontal wells, in pairs: one steam injector above one producer, told apart by each well's own Petrinex volumes.
Arteries: the named oil-sands trunk systems end to end: crude & dilbit, diluent, and liquids the AER licence leaves unspecified ("LVP products" under 500 mm: crude, dilbit or diluent). Every line ends at a project, at Edmonton or Hardisty, or at a named terminal. No direction is shown.
Export corridors: Trans Mountain, the Enbridge Mainline, Keystone and Express on their real routes (OpenStreetMap, ODbL), width in proportion to capacity within a thin band, drawn to just past the border. Dashed is a straight join across a gap in OpenStreetMap's coverage, not surveyed geometry.
Tan wash: First Nations reserve lands in Alberta and Saskatchewan, from NRCan/ISC's Aboriginal Lands of Canada Legislative Boundaries (Open Government Licence – Canada), with the official ISC names. Boundaries are simplified for display; it is a base layer and not tappable.
Tap any marker, box, artery or corridor for its own card.
A project's mark sits at its location; its pads appear from zoom 8.5 at the surface point their wells share. A pad is a group of wells carrying the same pad code in their names, or, where the names carry none, wells whose surface locations sit together.
Boxes and laterals draw for the open project only. A box is the rectangle along its laterals, reaching 50 m past their ends and half the spacing between laterals (never less than 50 m) past the outer ones, a stated assumption rather than a filed figure; where the operator filed its own pattern outline or pattern size, that is used. Three rules hold every box honest. A lateral that alone stretches a side by more than 15% stops shaping it, so long as the rest carry 90% of the pad's lateral length. A box without four right angles is rebuilt as the rectangle around its laterals. A box holding less than 90% of its laterals' length is rebuilt around them, unless it is one of the operator's own separately named patterns. A pad whose wells sit less than 600 m from their surface location on average gets no box: it is vertical or near-vertical, as on most cyclic-steam pads. A pad whose box fails a drilling-geometry check, a surface point off the box's axis or deep inside it, is drawn as a dot only.
Each lateral runs from the well's surveyed bottomhole back along the pad's axis to the box edge. The curved directional surveys are not public, so the heel is projected, not surveyed. Producers, injectors and infills are coloured apart; an infill is dashed. Saskatchewan has no public bottomhole survey, so its pads have no boxes or laterals.
The AER's provincial pipeline licences, operating segments only: crude and diluent lines, and the low-vapour-pressure liquids lines the licence does not resolve (drawn as crude from 500 mm, in a neutral colour below). Segments are joined where their ends meet within 250 m; a short piece that reaches neither a project nor a hub is dropped, and branches that lead nowhere are pruned, so every trunk ends at a project, at Edmonton, Hardisty or Cheecham, or at a named terminal. Hubs are placed from public-knowledge coordinates; the licence file names no places. Nothing shows flow direction or throughput, because the licences carry neither; the colours say what the lines carry, bitumen and dilbit out, diluent in. A project's own gathering lines draw when it is open.
A project's licences are joined to the trunk systems they belong to; a system reaches a hub when it comes within 5 km of Edmonton or Hardisty. A project that reaches both names both, with every corridor leaving each, because the map does not know how its barrels split.
Trans Mountain, the Enbridge Mainline, Keystone and Express are drawn from OpenStreetMap's mapped routes, clipped where they cross the border, each with its Canada Energy Regulator capacity. Where the open map has gaps in a route, the gap is joined with a straight dashed segment and the corridor's card says how much.
From zoom 10, each steam plant and the natural-gas and fuel-gas lines that reach it, followed up to 25 km from the plant. NGTL, the federal gas system, is drawn only where OpenStreetMap maps it, which is a small part of it near the oil sands.
sagd.app draws no net-pay, pay-thickness or formation-thickness map. Public net-pay data is either decades old and well outside today's pads, or drawn by each operator to its own cutoff, and neither supports a basin map a reader could compare across projects.
A project's formation is named on its card (topic 1).
Every filed figure, quote and event in sagd.app carries its source: the filing, its year and its page. Tap the figure to see it. The Board's full table and the comparison export to CSV. If a figure disagrees with a record you hold, the source line says exactly where to look, and if sagd.app has it wrong, report it.
A figure from a filing names the filing year and page; a quote is the filing's own words; an event names the filing that reported it. A figure from a public record names the record. Tap any of them to see the source line.
A project's compliance notes (monitoring, gas co-injection, plant and throughput items) are sentences from its own Directive 054 presentation, each cited to the filing and page. Nothing is added from anywhere else: if the filing does not mention it, neither does sagd.app.
The Board's full table exports to CSV: every project's current figures, then each one by year; the comparison exports the series it draws.
The coverage figures in the appendix are computed from sagd.app's own data files each time this page loads, so they always describe the data the map is showing.
sagd.app uses public data under its publishers' terms: the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) and Petrinex for regulatory data, the Government of Saskatchewan for well records, Alberta Energy and Minerals for royalty data, Environment and Climate Change Canada for emissions, the Canada Energy Regulator for pipeline capacities, OpenStreetMap contributors for the export routes, Natural Resources Canada for reserve lands, and Esri for the satellite imagery. Company names and logos are trademarks of their owners; they identify the operators and imply no endorsement. sagd.app is independent of every operator and regulator.
AER filings and datasets: the Alberta Energy Regulator's open-data terms. Petrinex: public volumetric data. Saskatchewan well records: Government of Saskatchewan Standard Unrestricted Use Data Licence (Version 2.0). Alberta Oil Sands Royalty Data: Open Government Licence – Alberta. Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program: Open Government Licence – Canada. Canada Energy Regulator pipeline profiles and the reserve lands: Open Government Licence – Canada. Export routes and NGTL: © OpenStreetMap contributors, Open Database License. Satellite imagery: Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics, under Esri's terms of use.
The licence text and dataset identifiers: Appendix.
The formulas, the source datasets, the coverage of the data the map is showing, and the licence text.
bbl/d = month's volume (m³) ÷ days in the month × 6.2898; kbpd = bbl/d ÷ 1,000share = member's rate ÷ parent's total × 100, printed whole from 1%, one decimal belowiSOR = steam (m³) ÷ bitumen (m³) in the display monthcSOR = Σ monthly steam ÷ Σ monthly bitumen over every month of the project seriescSOR = Σ steam ÷ Σ bitumen over the Petrinex months, January 2022 to the display monthcSOR = Σ (project cSOR × project rate) ÷ Σ project rate(median of up to 6 prior months − display month) ÷ median > 0.25, with at least 3 prior months: headline = Σ (rate × days) ÷ Σ days over the last 3 monthsΣ (monthly rate × days in month) ÷ Σ days over the months reported; royalty: barrels for the year ÷ days in the year|source − primary| ÷ primary; aligned when every divergence ≤ 5%(gross revenue − operating cost − royalty) ÷ bitumen barrels, CADMMcf/d = m³/d × 35.3147 ÷ 10⁶; energy, where not reported: 37.8 GJ per 10³ m³(display month − first oil month) ÷ 12, one decimal under a yearcompany colour mixed toward #dde5e8 by 0.85 × i ÷ (n − 1) (toward #6f7d8e for a very light company colour)| Dataset | Publisher | What sagd.app reads |
|---|---|---|
| Petrinex volumetrics, Alberta and Saskatchewan | Petrinex | Monthly well rows (bitumen, steam injected, water); facility rows at in-situ facilities (fuel gas, steam injected, flare, fresh water, disposal) |
| ST53 Alberta In Situ Oil Sands Summary | Alberta Energy Regulator | Bitumen, steam, steam-oil ratio and wells sheets, by project and month |
| Directive 054 annual in-situ performance presentations | The operators, filed to the AER | Pads and patterns, drainage patterns, development areas, recovery by pattern, facilities, compliance, plans, stated annual production |
| ST37 well list and bottomhole shapefile | Alberta Energy Regulator | Licence, name, status, surface location, on-production date, surveyed bottomhole |
| Pipeline licences (provincial shapefile) | Alberta Energy Regulator | Operating segments, substance, diameter, company, licence number |
| Alberta Oil Sands Royalty Data | Alberta Energy and Minerals | Royalty project bitumen barrels, revenue, costs and royalty; open.alberta.ca dataset d654eb04-dcb4-4359-abc3-c3914cfbad15 |
| Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, emissions by facility | Environment and Climate Change Canada | Facility emissions by year; open.canada.ca dataset a8ba14b7-7f23-462a-bdbb-83b0ef629823 |
| Saskatchewan Petroleum MapServer | Government of Saskatchewan | Each well's completion formations (COMPLETIONFORMATIONS), gis.saskatchewan.ca |
| Pipeline profiles | Canada Energy Regulator | Capacity of Trans Mountain (890 kbpd), the Enbridge Mainline (3,220), Keystone (620) and Express (310) |
| OpenStreetMap | OpenStreetMap contributors | Routes of the four export corridors and of NGTL, from the pipelines mapped under those names |
| Reserve lands | Natural Resources Canada, Indigenous Services Canada | First Nations reserve boundaries |
| Satellite imagery | Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics | The base map |
Computed from sagd.app's data files as this page loads.
| Computing… |
Computing…
Saskatchewan well records. Government of Saskatchewan Standard Unrestricted Use Data Licence (Version 2.0):
The Information Provider grants you a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive licence to use the Information, including for commercial purposes... Copy, modify, publish, translate, adapt, distribute or otherwise use the Information in any medium, mode or format for any lawful purpose.
Attribution, as the licence requires: "Contains information licensed under the Government of Saskatchewan Standard Unrestricted Use Data Licence (Version 2.0)."
Alberta Oil Sands Royalty Data. Open Government Licence – Alberta (licence id OGLA), attribution to Alberta Energy and Minerals; it permits copying, reuse and adaptation with attribution.
Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. Open Government Licence – Canada (licence id ca-ogl-lgo), attribution to Environment and Climate Change Canada; it permits copying, modifying and republishing, commercially included, with attribution.
Canada Energy Regulator pipeline profiles; reserve lands. Open Government Licence – Canada, attribution to the Canada Energy Regulator, and to Natural Resources Canada and Indigenous Services Canada.
Export routes and NGTL. © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database License.
AER filings and datasets; Petrinex. Alberta Energy Regulator regulatory filings and public datasets, used under the AER's open-data terms; Petrinex public volumetric data.
Satellite imagery. Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics, under Esri's terms of use.
Company names and logos are trademarks of their owners, shown to identify the operators, not to imply endorsement.