Petroleum & Natural Gas Sales Frequently Asked Questions

The Department maintains a database of information on major surface or environmental concerns that can lead to surface access restrictions including items such as ecological reserves, provincial parks, natural areas, key caribou habitat areas and integrated resource plan zones. Each restriction lists a contact person who can provide further information. These restrictions apply to land owned by the Crown. For privately owned or held land, you must contact the individual owner to negotiate access approval. To find out if there are any existing restrictions, you can use the Query by Map function available through the Posting Requests folder on the department’s Electronic Transfer System (ETS). A full search can also be done electronically by subscribing to ETS.

To find out about existing restrictions, you can also contact Crown Land Data Support in Edmonton at 780-422-1395 (call toll free in Alberta 310-0000), fax 780-422-9522 or email CrownLandDataSupport@gov.ab.ca and indicate that you want the surface and/or mineral restrictions included in a search.

You cannot post the land and rights in an expired agreement. If the status of a parcel reads “Expired Agreement” in the response you receive from the department, this means that you have requested rights in a location with an active agreement that is past its expiry date. Your request for the rights still held by that agreement will be withdrawn. You must wait until the agreement is continued or cancelled before you can request the rights. 

An application has been developed to help you determine when rights are available for posting. In the Posting Requests folder on ETS, you would open the Expired Agreement Notification page and enter the number of the expired agreement. You will receive an email when a decision has been made to either continue or cancel the agreement. You would then do a search to determine the status of the agreement and rights on Land Status Automated System (LSAS).

The maximum number of sections of land you can post for a lease or licence parcel is 15 sections in the Plains area, 32 sections in the Northern area and 36 sections in the Foothills area. 

Crown lands to be included in each parcel must be laterally or diagonally contiguous except where freehold and entirely disposed Crown rights intervene. The requested lands must not be separated by more than one section.

The minimum size for most lease parcels is the spacing unit for an oil well, except in the case where the Crown owns the petroleum and natural gas in only part of the spacing unit. 

A licence parcel in the Northern or Foothills area must contain at least one full section of land and in the Plains area you must post a minimum of six full sections of land. 

The maximum number of parcels for each posting request is ten. 

Parcels requested must be of the same type (lease or licence) and fall within a 3x3 township and range grid.

The term of a lease is five years in all regions. The term of a licence is two years in the Plains region, four years in the Northern region and five years in the Foothills region. View the Alberta Regional Boundary Map. 

At the end of the lease term, you must prove the land productive for continuation. Before the end of the licence term, you must drill a well. The depth of the well determines how many sections of land will be continued for an intermediate term of five years. Licences can be grouped for the drilling of a single well and the lands earned can be shared between the licences at expiry. The intermediate term of a licence provides an additional period of time for you to prove the land productive for continuation.

Land cannot be added to your posting request if the posting acceptance period for the sale is closed. As soon as the acceptance period for each sale is closed, all land requested for that sale is submitted to the Crown Mineral Disposition Review Committee (CMDRC). The CMDRC reviews the land for any surface restrictions. 

To add land to your posting request after the acceptance period is closed, you must withdraw your original posting request and re-post the land for the next available sale.

If the sale you requested is not already closed (each sale is closed one week prior to the sale’s publication date) or published, the Department can defer your posting request. There is the possibility that another requester could pre-empt you as the date you request a deferral will be the new received date of your posting request. 

Your posting cannot be deferred past the sale currently accepting posting requests. If this does not provide enough of a delay, you can either inform us (no later than one week prior to the publication date of the new sale date) to defer your posting request again or you can withdraw your posting request and re-submit it at a later date. 

The Department accepts an advance booking posting request when the requester wishes to time the purchase of an agreement(s) to an evaluation well being drilled to a depth greater than 3,000 metres. Data must be provided to prove that all rights requested will be evaluated by the well being drilled. 

Initially, an advance booking is advertised by way of a Notice of Pending Public Offering. This notice is published on the date shown in the sale schedule for the acceptance period in which the request was received. Parcels published in a notice of pending public offering cannot be withdrawn and will be published again in the Notice of Public Offering eight weeks prior to the sale.  

The interval between publishing the notice of pending public offering and the sale date depends on the depth of the well. The advance booking time for a 3,000-metre well is 16 weeks. This may be extended by one-week periods for each additional 50 metres in depth. 

The advance booking will be published in the Notice of Public Offering eight weeks before the sale date.

The normal cycle for a posting request is 17 weeks including two weeks for posting request acceptance, seven weeks for internal processing and eight weeks from the publication of the Public Offering Notice to the sale.

You can receive a copy of the sales results electronically by subscribing to the department’s electronic mailing list.

Results are available on the department website in three formats; csv, pdf and xml.