UBC’s Oil and Gas Investments: Ensign Energy
UBC has made environmental sustainability a priority in its most important strategic documents, its classes, its research, and its operations. Despite that, it invests over $4.5 million in the oil and gas sector. In this series, I will be profiling UBC’s oil and gas investments.
Today, Ensign Energy Services
UBC’s holdings:
1.33 million
Company profile:
Ensign Energy Services, Inc. provides contract well drilling and well servicing to the oil and natural gas industry. The Company operates throughout western Canada and the Rocky Mountain region of the United States.
Oil Rigs (as of the first quarterly report of 2011):
Canadian Operations (information from the 2011 Annual Report):
Ensign is Canada’s second largest land-based drilling contractor and fourth largest well servicing contractor.
We provide energy companies engaged in crude oil, natural gas and oil sands exploration and production with a wide range of oilfield services including land-based contract drilling, directional drilling, well servicing, underbalanced drilling, managed pressure drilling, oilfield rentals, wireline services, production testing and manufacturing services.
Our geographical reach extends across the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin (“WCSB”) – from southwest Manitoba, throughout Saskatchewan and Alberta to northeastern British Columbia, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon.
Increasingly important geographic areas of operations for us in Canada are the major resource plays in the WCSB: Canada’s oil sands in northern Alberta, where we provide coring drilling services in support of oil sands development, slant drilling and well servicing services for oil sands producers’ steam-assisted gravity drainage (“SAGD”) applications; the Montney and Horn River formations in northeastern British Columbia where we provide drilling and well servicing services in support of natural gas
development of these resource plays; and the Cardium and Duvernay formations in Alberta and the Bakken formation in Saskatchewan where we have a significant drilling presence and are a major provider of well servicing and oilfield equipment rentals.
The company’s position on environmental regulation:
It lists environmental regulations as one of its key “risks and uncertainties” in its financial fillings:
“The Company and its customers are subject to numerous laws and regulations governing its operations and the exploration and development of crude oil and natural gas, including environmental regulations. Existing and expected environmental legislation and regulations may increase the costs associated with providing oilfield services, as the Company may be required to incur additional operating costs or capital expenditures in order to comply with any new regulations. The costs of complying with increased environmental and other regulatory changes in the future, such as royalty regime changes, may also have an adverse effect on the cash flows of the Company’s customers and may dampen demand for oilfield services provided by the Company.”
