How Tourmaline Achieves Seamless Data Exchange Within 48 Hours of Acquisition

Contents

StackDX enables immediate data access, saving time, reducing labor costs, and streamlining decision-making for Tourmaline’s newly acquired assets. Within 48 hours of closing a major new acquisition, Tourmaline successfully filed, cataloged, and indexed 500,000 land and well files — saving hundreds of thousands of dollars on consultants while accelerating post-acquisition workflows.

About

Tourmaline Oil Corp

Tourmaline is Canada’s largest natural gas producer focused on long-term growth through an aggressive exploration, development, production and acquisition program in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin.

Website: tourmalineoil.com
Employees: 500+
Revenue: $6.71B (2023)
Avg. Production: 557,000 BOE/D

“We just acquired a company with hundreds of thousands of digital files. With StackDX, everything was in our environment within 48 hours.”

Magda Schmidt

Supervisor of Surface Land Admin | Tourmaline Oil Corp

Challenge

Time-consuming & complex data integration

In October 2023, Tourmaline Oil Corp (Tourmaline) acquired Bonavista Energy Corporation (Bonavista) for $1.45 billion. It was their largest acquisition to date — Tourmaline’s number of wells effectively doubled overnight.

Then came the hard part — transferring more than 6,000 well licenses between AB, BC, and SK and ingesting over 500,000 land and well files. An acquisition of this size would take most O&G companies months to complete.

Magda Schmidt, Supervisor of Surface Land Admin at Tourmaline, says, “Before StackDX, we would hire consultants to help with categorization and metadata tagging. For 500,000 files, we’d be looking at six months and hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

But the worst part isn’t the time or the cost — it’s human error. Every consultant interprets documents slightly differently, so it’s easy for files to be miscategorized. Retroactively catching and cleaning up mistakes is nearly impossible. “We work in such a fast-paced environment that taking the time to go and clean up somebody else’s work is unrealistic,” Magda says.

Solution

Instant access to centralized, consolidated data

With StackDX, ingesting 500,000 land and well files takes hours — not months. Seamless data exchange ensures that Magda and other Tourmaline personnel have access to data almost immediately upon acquisition closure. For the Bonavista deal, here’s how it worked:

Upload

Tourmaline closed the Bonavista deal on a Friday and delivered a hard drive containing 500,000 land and well files for their newly acquired 6,183 wells to Stack.

Process

Using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Stack’s proprietary AI “Edith” categorized the documents, assigned titles, and extracted metadata such as key dates and well locations. The newly ingested files had different naming conventions and no well subfolders, but Edith standardized new data to match Tourmaline’s existing data.

Connect

Bonavista’s licensed wells were added to Tourmaline’s existing database using publicly available data sources. Edith matched each folder from Bonavista to the corresponding well using clues like folder names and document contents. Folders that didn’t match licensed wells with high confidence were flagged for manual review.

Access

By Monday morning — 48 hours after closing — Tourmaline’s field and office teams had full access to Bonavista’s files. Stack’s powerful integrated search functionality enables Tourmaline’s entire team to seamlessly cross-reference well data against different systems, while also providing them with high confidence in the data.

Magda explains, “Stack integrates directly with our land system. We’re able to see the core information without flipping from application to application. We can even access public data, look at a map, zoom in to see if the site is clear or constructed, and drill down into the information.”

“Searching for documents used to feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. You might find part of a number, license, or disposition. Stack’s system integrates all those things into one and makes it easy to find — Edith can even read handwritten Post-It notes!”

Magda Schmidt

Supervisor of Surface Land Admin | Tourmaline Oil Corp

Results

Time & cost savings

The Bonavista deal is just one example of how Tourmaline uses StackDX to ingest, consolidate, and access critical land and well documents post-acquisition. To date, Tourmaline has closed 18 corporate acquisitions amidst many smaller asset acquisitions. Since adopting StackDX, the time required to file, catalogue, and index new files is now a fraction of what it used to be.

Magda says, “It’s nice because you’re not waiting until a six-month scan project is done to see your data. You’re seeing it in real time as it’s being ingested into the system.”

With fast access to core data and public records, Tourmaline can manage their acquisitions in real time. Land and asset employees can get to work immediately post-close — seamlessly picking up where these companies left off by completing stalled projects and drilling new wells.

As a result, Magda and her team save time and money on data reconciliation, while Tourmaline avoids costly delays as they evaluate new drilling opportunities and scale operations based on their acquisition strategy.

“Not only can you see your documents faster, but you can also understand and check data integrity very quickly. StackDX gives us consistency and that’s such a big part of document and data management.”

Magda Schmidt

Supervisor of Surface Land Admin | Tourmaline Oil Corp