Regina – The 25th Annual Williston Basin Petroleum Conference saw a definite impact from the oil downturn that has hit the industry since mid-2014. The
May 2-4 event, which alternates between Regina and Bismarck, N.D., saw a substantial drop in attendance compared to previous years it has been held in Regina. In Regina, attendance peaked in 2013 at roughly 2,200 people. This year’s conference had 635 total registrations.
Arden Marsh, of the Ministry of the Economy, said, “Based on the current economic situation, I think we can all agree it was fairly successful with the number of attendees we had.”
Last year’s numbers in Bismarck were also impacted, with a substantial reduction in the number of booths. However, overall attendance got a substantial boost when presidential candidate Donald Trump was announced as the keynote speaker at the end, and that those attending could be able to attend Trump’s speech. As it turned out, just before he arrived at the conference, Trump secured enough support to lock up the Republican presidential primaries and become the party’s candidate for president. The rest is, quite literally, history.
Trump makes a pretty tough act to follow, as Mark Lenko of Canadian Discovery, pointed out in his, the final presentation of this year’s show.
This year’s keynote speaker was Minister of Energy and Resources Dustin Duncan, who spoke about the importance of getting our oil to tidewater.
The number of booths was down to around 50, compared to around 200 for the show two and four years ago. Despite this, the attendance during technical sessions was strong, and appeared similar to previous years. Most of the technical sessions focused on geology, which has always been the core of the conference from the beginning, when it started as an invitation-only event for a few dozen people.
The presentations varied from presentations on the characteristics of the Great Plains polygonal fault system within the Williston Basin to Bakken production optimization of surface facilities. Of particular interest was a presentation by Michael Nelson of the Saskatchewan Ministry of the Economy on evaluating production performance of horizontal well refracs in Saskatchewan. That presentation showed that wells that were initially fracked, then fracked again several years later, would often, but not always show results that were nearly as good as when the well first went on initial production.
