LAND AND RECLAMATION

The environment is often categorized into land, air and water. While many stakeholders think of air and water as human health-related issues, land typically has a more personal, sometimes even spiritual, connotation. Land is 'home'-where we live, where we work and where we play.

In southern Canada, urban residents and rural landowners live side by side with the upstream oil and gas industry. In the vast and largely unsettled boreal forest, the petroleum and forestry industries operate where thousands of Canadians live, hunt, fish and trap. We all share this land with a diversity of plant and animal species that form the fabric of Canada's forest, foothills and grasslands ecosystems.

THE CHALLENGE

In most areas where CAPP members operate, there are many layers of rights occupying the same piece of ground. Oil and gas rights are sold in layers, with different companies owning the rights to drill at a specific depth beneath the surface. Other users, such as agriculture, forestry and rural landowners, may have surface rights to build houses, grow crops, graze cattle or harvest trees. And much of the boreal region is also identified as traditional land by Canada's Aboriginal peoples.

The challenge is how to honour the rights of one user without compromising the rights of another, or the integrity of the natural environment.

COMMITTED TO OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE

FOOTPRINT MANAGEMENT

The first way CAPP members can tackle this challenge is to minimize the area of land we use in the first place. We do this by avoiding sensitive habitats, using narrower seismic lines, optimizing the area we need for our well sites, and working with other users to overlap our disturbance footprint and share roads and pipelines.

ALBERTA CHAMBER OF RESOURCES ILM PROJECT

In the late 1990s, the Alberta Chamber of Resources-an association of forestry, mining, oil and gas, and other Alberta industries-launched its Integrated Landscape Management (ILM) program to proactively address the cumulative impacts of resource-based land use.

The ILM program represents the first large scale Canadian effort to reduce the ecological impacts of industrial projects by coordinating activities between land users. Example projects include coordination of new road networks across multiple oil and gas and forestry companies in Alberta's foothills, and overlap of forestry harvesting areas with oil sands developments in the southern Athabasca region.

Many of the footprint management approaches piloted under the ILM project are now commonly applied by CAPP members and other industrial land users.

FACILITY MAINTENANCE AND SPILL MANAGEMENT

Facilities and pipelines are managed to minimize our impact on the surrounding environment while we are active, and facilitate successful reclamation when the sites are no longer needed. These management practices include:

• Topsoil conservation and invasive species management;
• Monitoring, preventative maintenance and timely repair of equipment and pipelines;
• Use of best management practices when transporting liquids such as diesel fuel and chemicals; and
• Reporting and timely clean-up of accidental spills.

The ESSIM plan is awaiting final approval by the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans. Flowing from the ESSIM plan will be a series of action plans, the first of which is a consideration of special planning on the Scotian Shelf. CAPP participated in an information workshop in November hosted by DFO to determine how and where spatial planning can be effective in offshore Nova Scotia. CAPP and its members remain committed to participating and inputting into this initiative.

RECLAMATION

WELL SITE RECLAMATION

Removing our facilities and reclaiming the land in a timely fashion is a key part of managing our footprint.

Reclamation of a typical well site involves 'abandonment'- capping the well bore and pipelines underground and removing all surface equipment-and 'reclamation'-removing gravel, cleaning up any chemicals, oil or salt water in the soil, replacing soil removed during construction and re-planting with native species. It will take approximately five years to fully reclaim a typical well site.

WELL SITE RESTORATION PROJECT

The Well Site Restoration project is co-funded by the Alberta Pacific Forest company, CAPP, individual CAPP members and the University of Alberta.

Traditional reclamation practices involve re-seeding with native grass species-quickly re-vegetating disturbed sites to control soil erosion and run-off to nearby rivers and creeks. But re-seeding grass in forested regions impedes natural regrowth of shrubs and trees, resulting in fibre loss and habitat fragmentation.

Researchers at the University of Alberta are looking at how new construction practices can maintain moisture, nutrients and roots in the soil. Researchers believe that these practices will provide the right conditions for replanting of native conifers, and facilitate natural regrowth of aspen and poplar trees.

The results of this independent third party study are expected in early 2008, and will help improve construction and reclamation practices in Canada's forested regions.

ORPHAN WELL RECLAMATION

The Orphan Well Association (OWA) is a not-for-profit Alberta organization created to manage the abandonment and reclamation of upstream oil and gas orphan wells, pipelines, facilities and their associated sites.

The association operates under the authority of the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board (ERCB), the body tasked with regulating the province's oil and gas industry.

The OWA is funded by the oil and gas industry, with the majority coming through an Orphan Fund Levy. This levy is based on the abandonment and reclamation liabilities held by each company, and is collected annually by the ERCB and remitted to the OWA.

OIL SANDS RECLAMATION

Reclamation of oil sands mines occurs throughout the life of each project and is closely linked with tailings management.

Tailings are a mixture of water, clay, sand and residual bitumen produced through the oil sands extraction process. Tailings are stored in ponds where the clay/water mixture forms a stable suspension. These ponds occupy a large area of a typical oil sands mine, and are often built in a discontinued mine pit.

Before tailings ponds can be reclaimed, water must be removed from the tailings suspension - a process that can take many years. CAPP members have invested millions of dollars on de-watering research, and in the mid-1990s introduced tailings management technology that uses additives such as gypsum to rapidly release water from the tailings mixture. Once dewatering is complete, reclamation of ponds and discontinued mine pits to functioning forest ecosystems commences.