A landowners group in southern Alberta wants a pause in the province’s booming natural gas drilling industry until all environmental implications are mapped.
Drilling for a particular form of natural gas, called coalbed methane, concerns Alan Gardner, executive director of the Southern Alberta Land Trust based at Chain Lakes, where energy companies are in a frenzy applying to search for gas.
Exploration for unconventional gas is soaring because natural gas demand is growing and its price has doubled in a year, but new conventional gas pools are smaller and flow rates lower.
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Yet even as conventional gas reserves play out, new technology is making available the gas in coal seams – a supply so big some liken it to the oil sector’s tarsands. But its extraction requires many wells in a single section of land to pull out the stubborn resource.
According to Alberta’s energy department, coalbed methane is attached or absorbed into the coal itself, instead of being trapped in the pore space of the rock like most conventional natural gas. Pressure from overlying rock and water within the seams keeps the methane gas bound to the coal.
The gas can be extracted by reducing the pressure in the coal seam, sometimes by pumping groundwater out, so that the natural gas flows through fractures in the coal into the well bore. Often the coal must be fractured to create channels for the gas to flow to.
The Southern Alberta Land Trust sees itself as the guardian of the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, where coalbed methane reserves are suspected to be plentiful. The group has many concerns about how the environment could be damaged if they are developed.
“One of them is protection of the native fescue grasses disturbed by drilling and access roads,” Gardner said.
This is one of the few remaining native fescue grasslands in North America supporting cattle, wildlife and protecting the watershed.
Native grass is susceptible to invasive plants if it is disturbed. Reseeding efforts almost always fail.
Native grasslands are good for watersheds, holding topsoil and filtering rain and snow that eventually find their way to aquifers. These aquifers are a major source of water for downstream communities across southern Alberta.
Gardner’s group is worried that deep aquifers could be damaged by increased drilling and fracturing of the coal seams.
Further, companies typically use saline water mixed with chemicals to fracture the formations and fine sand may be used to hold the formation open. Some sites would need to be fractured many times to draw up the gas.
“If you go down there and you pump a lot of noxious fluids and chemicals, even if they are 1,000 or 2,000 feet down, there is no way you can say it won’t come back up to the surface,” Gardner said.
So far, companies have backed away from the eastern slopes because drilling is not now economical. But they might return.
Gardner wants the province to measure the value of the surface and subsurface resources.
This is an important economic region for ranching, tourism, hunting and movie production, he said.
“All of those things depend on the surface as it is. If you damage that for short-term economic gain, we may find in 20 years, we may say we shouldn’t have done that because the gas is gone and the rest isn’t coming back.”
He also wants the government to fully survey the province’s ground water supplies. Some university researchers have proposed projects on grassland watersheds that could fill in some of that information gap.
“Why don’t we do some more research and science to find out more about the watershed and its value before we go in there drilling all these holes and potentially damaging that watershed?”
Gardner said some gas reserves should be left for future Albertans.
“Why don’t we leave some of this gas in the ground for future generations and by then the technology of extracting it will be much better?”
