Resource Endowment

Updated June 2024

Quantifying Alberta’s energy resource endowment and maintaining the AER’s evolving reporting system requires understanding the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin. The Geological Atlas of the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin describes Alberta's geological history. The geological origin and structure of Alberta’s strata ultimately determine the type and extent of Alberta’s energy resources. The Alberta Table of Formations provides information on Alberta’s stratigraphic succession of geological units and geological timescale. 

Petroleum Systems

The exploration, development, and regulation of petroleum resources must account for different hydrocarbon systems within a sedimentary basin and how the hydrocarbon is trapped within the rock.

Petroleum is generated in a source rock as bitumen, oil, natural gas, or a mixture. It can remain in the source rock or migrate to an inorganic host rock. It can occupy the pores and fractures in the rock or be a component of organic material. A petroleum system is the linked geological assemblage of all source rocks plus associated reservoirs and traps. Alberta has nine petroleum systems (as defined by the Alberta Geological Survey).

Coalification also generates natural gas. Treating coal as a source rock brings the total number of potential petroleum sources at the geological formation level in Alberta to at least 14. Among global sedimentary basins, this is a large number of petroleum systems and is one reason why Alberta has a large petroleum and coal endowment.

Geological Plays

Within each petroleum system, the AER has defined geological plays to help assess reserves and resources in Alberta.

A geological play is a set of known or postulated accumulations of petroleum (pools and deposits) within a petroleum system that share the same geological, geographical, and temporal properties, such as source rock, migration pathways, timing, trapping mechanism, mode of occurrence, and hydrocarbon type. 

The following organizations use the play concept for resource estimation:

  • the Geological Survey of Canada
  • the Canadian Gas Potential Committee 
  • the United States Geological Survey 

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