MOUNTAIN VIEW COUNTY - The county will explore options for a permitting policy to be applied when water lines and pumps for oilfield fracking operations are placed in county ditches.
Councillors passed a motion at the recent regularly scheduled council meeting instructing administration to seek legal advice on the matter and report back to council.
Coun. Peggy Johnson, who represents Division 6, put forward a notice of motion on Feb. 28, with the matter discussed at the March 13 council meeting.
Fracking is a process where water and other liquids are injected down a bore hole to facilitate production of oil and/or gas. The water used in the process is not recovered.
“Through the Municipal Government Act, of course, the county owns the ditches as well as the roads and we have a legal right to ask for fees for people who are using that land,” said Johnson. “There needs to be insurance in case something goes wrong.
“The pumps are probably about the same size and weights as having an SUV in the ditch for about a week and under improvement and remediation requirements we certainly know that as the skid steer comes along the edge of our chipseal roads there is some breakage of the shoulder and some extra rutting based on putting both the reels of hose and the pumps into the ditch.”
During the meeting Johnson presented a chart of fresh groundwater usage for oil and gas activities in B.C. and Alberta in 2022.
“You can see that the fifth and sixth biggest users are Whitecap and Tourmaline, and right now in Division 6 Whitecap and Tourmaline are doing both drilling and fracking and you can see that their annual use of water in 2022 was 49 million barrels (Whitecap) and 45 million barrels (Tourmaline), a barrel being 45 gallons,” she said.
According to the chart, the companies used a combined total of 4.2 billion gallons of water for fracking in 2022.
“So a huge amount of water is being pumped through Mountain View County ditches and being used for fracking,” she said.
The county does not currently require companies to provide insurance when using the county’s ditches, council heard.
“The municipality owning the ditches has every legal right to ask for a payment for those waterlines being in our ditches,” said Johnson.
Council passed a motion instructing administration to bring back options for a “permitting policy to be applied when water lines and pumps for fracking are placed in county ditches, and that one option include market value pricing based on how how many miles of pipe are on the ditch and much water is going through the pipe.”
The county's chief administrate officer, Jeff Holmes, said the county will be seeking legal advice regarding the municipality’s ability to charge a fee for use of its ditches to transport water and related information.
