Encana agreement to buy water for frac’ing from the town of Rimbey signed

Encana agreement to buy water for frac’ing from the town of Rimbey signed by Treena Mielke, April 2, 2013, Rimbey Review
With very little fanfare or discussion, council gave the go-ahead to an agreement with Encana to sell Rimbey’s wastewater. Representatives from Encana were in the gallery at the March 25 council meeting, but councilors had no questions for them. Under the terms of the agreement, Encana would purchase 180,000 cubic metres of wastewater at $2.25 per cubic metre to be extracted from the town’s lagoon in the northeast edge of town. Mayor Sheldon Ibbotson said earlier he sees the proposal as a sweet deal for the town. “The opportunity to sell our wastewater allows us to chip away at our seven million dollar infrastructure deficit.”

Spokesman Doug McIntyre said Encana doesn’t have a firm start-up date but is pleased to know they will have the ability to access the wastewater. “We are very happy to be able to source this effluent water. We currently have three rigs operating in the Duvernay (play) and plan to have four running by year-end. One of these is located fairly close to Rimbey,” he said. Encana will comply with federal, provincial and municipal laws when accessing the wastewater, he said.

“We will work closely with the Town of Rimbey in terms of managing the transport of the effluent as safely as possible and to minimize any impacts to local traffic.” Using wastewater for their operations is one of the ways Encana has come up with to use water efficiently. The company has worked with Apache to design and build the Debolt Water Treatment Plan and to develop the Debolt formation as a water source reservoir. Operational since June 2010, the plant has significantly reduced surface water use and is expected to fulfill a minimum of 80 per cent of the water needed by Encana and Apache for hydraulic fracturing operations in the Two Island Lake area of the Horn River Basin in northeastern British Columbia. Encana has converted two pre-producing gas wells in the Farmington area of northeastern British Columbia to saline source water wells meaning the wells are producing water instead of natural gas. [Emphasis added]

[Refer also to:

Marcellus Watch: Judge’s ruling protects Corning aquifer April 1, 2013, Corning Leader While the craven New York State Legislature has been AWOL on vital gas drilling issues for years, state court judges, fortunately, have been quietly doing their job. Last week a state Supreme Court judge in Rochester smacked down efforts by a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell to purchase fresh water to frack its Pennsylvania gas wells from the financially down-and-out Village of Painted Post.

AEA: Support to the identification of potential risks for the environment and human health arising from hydrocarbons operations involving hydraulic fracturing in Europe ”A proportion (25% to 100%) of the water used in hydraulic fracturing is not recovered, and consequently this water is lost permanently to re-use, which differs from some other water uses in which water can be recovered and processed for re-use.” [Emphasis added]

A Primer for Understanding Canadian Shale Gas – Energy Briefing Note by National Energy Board, November 2009. “Drilling and hydraulically fracturing wells can be water-intensive procedures; however, there is very limited Canadian experience from which to estimate potential environmental impacts.” ….the rate of development of shale gas may become limited by the availability of required resources, such as fresh water…. ]

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