The South Wapiti coal occurrence is located along and near Becker Creek about 67 kilometres south of Tumbler Ridge. The project area is in the Peace River coalfield, in the northern Rocky Mountain foothills. It is underlain by an assemblage of continental margin and shelf facies rocks that were deposited on and to the west of the Ancestral North American craton.

The South Wapiti is part of a long belt of exposure of coal-bearing rocks along the western margin of the southern Peace coalfield. The belt includes, from north to south, areas historically known as Five Cabin (also known as Horizon, 093I 032), Onion (also known as Onion Lake, 093I 012), North Wapiti, South Wapiti, Red Deer Dip Slope, Belcourt, Secus (093I 015), and Nekik. The South Wapiti is here defined as in Coal Assessment 745, as the part of this belt that lies between the Wapiti and Red Deer rivers. It has also been known as the "Wapiti Dip Slope" and was a sub-region in the larger historical Monkman and Belcourt West properties of the 1970s to 1990s. It is currently (as of 2014) part of the Belcourt West property of the Belcourt Saxon Coal Limited Partnership.

Coal occurs in the Lower Cretaceous Gething (Bullhead Group) and Gates (Fort St. John Group) formations. The coal-bearing rocks are exposed on the western limb of the Wapiti anticline (Coal Assessment Report 541), and are structurally overlain by Paleozoic rocks to the west along the southwest dipping Wapiti thrust. Coal-bearing Cretaceous units are exposed on the western limb of the Wapiti anticline. In some reports this area is referred to as the Wapiti Dip Slope.

Tenure in the Wapiti Dip Slope area was acquired by McIntyre Mines in 1970, as part of a 75 kilometre long belt of tenure called the Monkman Pass Coal Licenses that extended from Kinuseo Creek in the north to the Narraway River in the south. McIntyre Mines conducted reconnaissance and limited geologic mapping in 1970 and 1973, and identified four main coal seams in the Wapiti Dip Slope area (Coal Assessment Report 539). Further mapping was conducted in 1975 by Canadian Superior Oil Limited (Coal Assessment Report 540). Pacific Petroleums Limited drilled one hole north of Mount Becker in 1976 and did coal quality analyses. The hole intersected four coal seams in the Gething Formation, the thickest being 2.7 metres thick (Coal Assessment Report 541). A 1988 review of the belt by Petro-Canada identified two possible pits in the North Wapiti area, along strike on the Wapiti Dip Slope to the north of South Wapiti, with combined in situ coal resource of 130.2 million tonnes. In 2008, Peace River Coal Incorporated completed an open-hole and diamond drill (HQ) coring program on the South Wapiti part of their Belcourt West project on behalf of Belcourt Saxon Coal Limited Partnership; 1421 metres of drilling was completed, including 875 metres of percussion drilling in three holes and 546 metres of diamond core drilling in two holes (Coal Assessment Report 944).