Paula Bordeleau believed her request was reasonable to move a proposed gas well from the north side of her home to the south side to reduce pollution.
Her son, Coleman, has breathing problems. With the prevailing winds coming from the north, she wanted to minimize the amount of pollution coming from a proposed well into her home.
“I said, ‘go ahead and move it to the south side of the residence.’ “
When the resulting fight between Bordeleau and the gas company went to the Alberta Energy Utilities Board, where landowner complaints are directed, the AEUB sided with the gas company.
Read Also
Government, industry seek canola tariff resolution
Governments and industry continue to discuss how best to deal with Chinese tariffs on Canadian agricultural products, particularly canola.
What the protesters perceive as an unwillingness on behalf of the AEUB to deal with landowner concerns has forced four neighbours, each with their own grievances, to join.
By waving their picket signs outside the Alberta Surface Rights Federation annual meeting, where AEUB chair Neil McCrank was expected to speak, the group hoped to catch his ear.
“We’re saying there’s gross injustice going on,” said Reg Maltais of Sunnybrook, who said McCrank never returns his calls.
It is the third protest for the group, which may soon run the risk of being labelled chronic complainers, said Rodger Ellis of Sunnybrook.
Inside the hotel, the mood was the same. The back wall was lined with pictures of oilfield horror stories. There were rows of pictures of broken pipelines, pastures littered with garbage, seismic holes left open and wells flaring high in the night sky. There were more than 120 people at the one-day meeting, double the number that attended a few years ago.
Conflicts between landowners and the petroleum industry are not being reduced, said Tony Nichols, chair of the Alberta Surface Rights Federation.
“There are ongoing problems with the energy industry.”
Peter Watson, an assistant deputy minister of the Alberta environment department, said he sees little change in the number of concerns between landowners and petroleum firms.
“The reality is nothing has changed since 1998. There’s still the same amount of complaints,” said Watson.
“From our perspective we have not moved ahead,” he told the group.
There are more than 225,000 wells drilled in Alberta; 40,000 of them in the past three years. About 28,000 wells and 18,400 pipelines have been abandoned by their owners and 3,500 contaminated battery sites need to be dealt with.
Eighteen inspectors oversee all the wells.
With Alberta’s population expected to continue growing, McCrank said the conflict is likely to continue.
He told the group that in the 1970s there were only about 60 oil and gas companies and his board knew them by name.
Now there are 1,500 oil and gas companies in the province with takeovers that happen daily, making it difficult to follow the ownership.
