Steve MacLellan

Sales of Crown drilling rights — needed to allow energy
exploration on land where mineral rights are held by the province — have
fallen off dramatically in B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan this year.

“When
drilling rights are going well, it tends to mean somebody has found
either a good reservoir or a good way to produce a known reservoir and
so you get a lot of excitement,” said Richard Masson, an executive
fellow with the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary.

“This
says to me, there’s no excitement at all right now. People are doing
little bits of infill land buying but there’s nothing that looks like a
very prospective play that would excite the industry and excite new
capital to come in.”