Oil and natural gas flow out of more than 163,000 Alberta wells today, reports the Energy Resources Conservation Board. The total drilled since the industry’s birth a century ago tops 460,000, show records kept by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

But don’t try to tell Dean Rokosh and Andrew Beaton that the province is picked over, exploration is finished and there are no more fortunes left to find. “We’ve just scratched the surface,” says Rokosh in the resource assessment section of the Alberta Geological Survey. “It’s fun to share this stuff,” says Beaton, an AGS team leader.

Rokosh is referring to a new treasure map he is helping to compile by probing into shale layers that lie beneath most of Alberta’s Texas-sized area of 661,848 square kilometers. He is on an exploration marathon that uses methods from hammering samples off remote outcrops to unmasking the rocks’ innermost fabric with an electron microscope on the University of Alberta’s campus in Edmonton.

The fun part described by Beaton grows out of a policy that for 88 years has set the province apart from most other oil and gas-producing jurisdictions – and given geologists like him professionally exciting jobs. Their results are an open book, and the script finds its way onto a big stage.

“Our audience is everybody in Alberta,” Beaton says. “We’re trying to provide the science so people can make well-informed decisions.”

From its birth as a government agency in 1921, the Edmonton-based AGS has had a mandate to make discoveries known promptly. Unlike their peers at companies and universities, Rokosh and Beaton are not muzzled by business needs to keep trade secrets, or academic rivalry that hoards new knowledge until it can be published with a scholarly splash.

The shale gas expedition, helped by a $200-million provincial energy innovation fund, is still young by technical research standards. But six reports are available as “open file” documents. More are in preparation.

To be useful for resource exploration, the reports are uncompromisingly technical and crammed with data ready to be plugged into computer programs. They are long on maps, codes, charts, numbers, chemical assays and microscope photography. They are short on language readily understood by anyone without a geology degree.

But touches of explorer excitement occasionally pop up. The Colorado Group of formations that carpets most of Alberta, for instance, “may contain many of the different types of shale gas plays. Classic organic-rich black shale can be found,” says a GSA report. “Characteristics of the shales are very encouraging. Clearly, permeability [natural cracking that well completion technology can expand into a flow channel network] exists in many of the shale horizons and meets or exceeds the estimations from shale gas plays found in the United States.”

Instead of providing the proverbial X that marks the spot for fortune hunters, AGS reports are lures to exploration. “We urge caution in our initial analysis because the results are preliminary and in no way suggest that there are reserves in these areas. We are simply suggesting that the potential exists for these types of plays in the Colorado Group of Alberta.”

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