AER Alberta Energy Outlook (ST98)

Oil & Gas Drilling - the one annual that doesn't just count Alberta's wells; it calls the next decade of them. The Alberta Energy Outlook, ST98 in the report numbering, is the Alberta Energy Regulator's flagship statistical publication: one volume on the state of hydrocarbon reserves and the supply-and-demand outlook for crude bitumen, crude oil, natural gas, natural gas liquids, coal and emerging resources. The 2025 edition, updated in June 2025, carries 2024 actuals, a base-case projection for 2025 through 2034 and a one-year tariff scenario parked beside it.

Drilling gets first-class treatment rather than a chart appendix. Dedicated sections on crude oil, natural gas and crude bitumen well activity report new wells placed on production, broken out by Petroleum Services Association of Canada (PSAC) area and by target formation, and eleven companion data files - ten workbooks plus one reserve archive - turn the narrative into rows. The 2024 numbers make the case for taking the series seriously: 3,385 new crude oil wells placed on production, up 23 percent in a single year, more than 99 percent of them horizontal. Against a 1,744-dataset catalog averaging 7.81, this record scores 9 of 10, and it anchors our oil gas drilling data hub as the slice's only forecasting primary.

Get a sample of this dataset: name the commodities, PSAC areas and years you model, and rows arrive in exactly the shape documented below.

The crude-oil workbook announces its own layout outright - Disclaimer, Figures, Tables and Units sheets - and the well story lives in five numbered tables. Their shapes:

Table S4.1 - Alberta crude oil production and new wells placed on production, highlights
Year           : 1999 ... 2024 ... 2034   <- actuals to the latest year, forecast years beyond
New Wells PoP  : 3,385                    <- placements in 2024, up from 2,760 in 2023
Production     : <annual volumes>         <- reported alongside the counts

Table S4.2 - Alberta new crude oil wells placed on production, by PSAC area (series from 1999)
PSAC Area      : 1 | 2 | 5 | 6            <- the geographic breakout
Formation      : Cardium | Viking | Mannville Group   <- where the 2024 horizontals concentrated
Horizontal     : 3,370 of 3,385 statewide <- more than 99 percent of placements
Vertical       : 15 statewide             <- down 52 percent year over year

Table S4.3 - supply costs by PSAC area
Supply Cost    : <dollars per unit, one value per PSAC area>

Table S4.4 - forecast initial productivity for new wells
Initial Prod.  : <cubic metres per day, per new well>

Table S4.5 - forecast decline rates
Decline Rate   : <first-year falloff, per new well>

Read the anatomy rather than the arithmetic. The unit of account is a placement, not a permit: a well enters the count in the year it actually began producing, which makes the series a cleaner activity signal than licence counts that can sit idle for years. The horizontal share is the story the structure makes visible - 3,370 of 3,385 statewide placements in 2024, with the vertical remnant down to 15 - and the Formation column gives the second axis, with the Cardium and Viking Formations and the Mannville Group carrying the 2024 program. The forecast tables close the loop by handing over decline-curve assumptions pre-modeled instead of reverse-engineered. Values shown are the documented shapes and published highlights; live series for your years, commodities and areas arrive with the sample.

Eight verified fields carry the well-activity story, transcribed from the report's own documentation rather than inferred from column headers. The design choice worth noticing: time, place and economics travel together on one spine. Year keys everything, running from 1999 in the historical tables out to 2034 in the forecast. PSAC Area and Formation provide two independent geographies - service-industry territory versus target rock - so the same activity series can be organized either way without re-keying anything. And the economics attach directly to the count: Supply Cost prices each PSAC area, while Initial Productivity and Decline Rate pre-model how a new well should behave, which is why this table can answer is drilling here worth it without ever leaving the row.

• Geo: The Province of Alberta, cut three ways - by PSAC area, by oil sands area and by geological formation. Provincial totals stay available for national-supply work, and the breakouts resolve the same number down to a single formation's drilling program.
• Temporal: Annual actuals, with the crude-oil well-count series starting in 1999; a rolling ten-year forecast appended to every edition; archived editions running 2001 through 2024 for vintage-consistent backfills.
• Granularity: Provincial totals with PSAC-area and formation-level detail on an annual clock - counts of wells, dollars per unit of production and forecast parameters, not well-level records.

That footprint fills the gap nothing else in the slice covers. State regulators publish history; consultants publish opinion; this is the one primary that publishes a regulator-grade trajectory, with the assumptions attached. It is also the reason the record leads our ranking of the slice despite shipping aggregates where its neighbours ship point files.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

Ask for the outlook the way you will use it: one commodity's well-count series since a start year, the full actuals-plus-forecast span keyed by PSAC area, or the supply-cost, productivity and decline tables joined to the counts they explain. Extracts arrive shaped to the dictionary above with years, areas and units intact, so delivered rows join straight onto your own price deck or acreage map instead of after a workbook archaeology project. Sample first: name the commodities, areas and years you actually model, check the columns against your own numbers, then set the cadence - daily suits an activity monitor watching forecast bands, weekly fits a valuation refresh, and hourly earns its keep only when something downstream is genuinely that impatient.

• Market researchers and consultants treat it as the citable baseline for Alberta energy statistics - market sizing and country briefs built from regulator-published counts rather than trade-press estimates. Workflow context sits on the market researchers use cases page.
• Investors and quant researchers position against the same trajectory operators plan on: reserves context, expected new-well productivity and a decade of projected activity for scenario and country-comparison work. See the investors quants use cases page.
• Data scientists and ML engineers use the annual panel as the prior for activity models - forecast initial productivity and first-year decline rates beat fitting decline curves from scratch. Patterns live on the data scientists use cases page.
• Competitive intelligence and sales teams watch which PSAC areas and formations are adding horizontal wells - a territory-named leading indicator for services demand ahead of procurement cycles.
• Journalists, academics and students get the official numbers behind every Alberta drilling story, forecast included, with provenance that survives a citation check.
• Developers and builders wire typed extracts into dashboards tracking placements against forecast bands. See developers builders use cases.

• Alberta Energy Regulator Statistical Reports (ST series) - the monthly engine room: ST3 supply-and-disposition matrices across eight product lines and ST39 facility-level oil sands detail. This outlook supplies the forecast that sits above those actuals.
• EIA Drilling Productivity Report - the American counterpart that also forecasts: seven U.S. shale regions with new-well production per rig and legacy decline. Pair them for a North American activity corridor.
• Baker Hughes Rig Count - the high-frequency pulse. Rigs lead, placements on production confirm; the two series bracket every cycle call.
• Colorado ECMC (COGCC) Data Portal - the resolution contrast: 124,387 individually identified wells when the question names a borehole. The head-to-head is worked through properly on the comparison page.
• Texas Railroad Commission Oil & Gas Data Sets Available for Download - the deepest onshore regulatory archive south of the border, for basin screens that cross the forty-ninth parallel.

Two glossary notes sharpen the vocabulary before you commit: how oil and gas reserves are defined and restated between editions, and why well production data is a different grain from the counts of new wells this record publishes.

Four caveats ride with this record. First, aggregation is the entire design: counts by commodity, PSAC area and formation - no coordinates, licence numbers or operator names survive, so borehole-level questions belong with a registry-grain source. Second, treat reserve figures as versioned: the 2025 edition's reserve data reflect an external analysis, the report flags possible further revision, and a third-party evaluation's impacts are deferred to the following edition. Third, the mapping side lags the tables - bitumen thickness maps still ship as the 2016-vintage bundle with no newer GIS release appearing on the statistics page as of our August 2026 review, so pin spatial layers against delivered rows before building on them. Fourth, the clock is annual: it answers where the trajectory points, not what happened last week, so pair it with faster indicators when timing matters. None of these blocks a sample; all four get settled before anything depends on them.