Experience
Eighteen years, four hundred wells.
Kestrel was started in 2008 by two drilling consultants who were tired of being the third name on somebody else’s rotation. We have stayed small on purpose.
How we got here
Six consultants, no rotation roulette.
Ray Kestrel and Dane Whitecalf met on a sour gas program near Fox Creek in 2004 and spent four years watching good operators get whoever the consulting firm had spare. In 2008 they started taking work directly.
The company has grown to six supervisors and stopped there. Six is the number where we can still guarantee that the person we put on your location is one we have personally worked beside. Past that, we would be selling you a logo.
Between the six of us: 18 years as Kestrel, and something north of 140 years of combined field time before that.
Representative programs
A cross-section of recent work.
Montney pad program
Fourteen horizontal wells off three pads near Dawson Creek. Day and night drilling supervision plus completions through to tie-in. Programme finished nine days inside the AFE schedule.
2025 · NE BCSour gas re-entry
Two-well re-entry and recompletion in a 12% H2S field near Fox Creek. Full contingency planning, third-party air monitoring, and zero exceedances across forty-one days on location.
2025 · Fox Creek, ABAbandonment campaign
Sixty-three inactive wellbores abandoned and cut-and-capped over two seasons for a mid-size operator working down its liability. Thirty-one reclamation certificates applied for to date.
2023–25 · SE AlbertaHeavy oil workover rotation
Ongoing service rig supervision across a producing property near Kindersley. Pump change intervals extended by roughly a third after we rebuilt the failure tracking.
2022–present · SW Sask.Duvernay delineation
Four exploratory horizontals for an operator with no in-house drilling group. Kestrel managed the program end to end, from AFE preparation through vendor tendering to on-stream.
2024 · Drayton Valley, ABWhat operators say
“They called me at four in the morning to tell me they were shutting the job down, and they were right. That is the entire reason we still use them.”— Drilling superintendent, mid-cap producer · illustrative example
“We do not have a drilling group. Kestrel is our drilling group. They hand us a well and a folder that survives an audit.”— VP Operations, private producer · illustrative example
References
Ask us for names.
We will put you on the phone with operators we have worked for, including one where the job went badly and we had to tell them so.