• 7 years ago
• Posted in:Articles
• 0
• Author: Jierui

Alberta is the Canadian western province, enriched with diverse resources portfolio including natural gas, coal, mineral, and the most famous Alberta oil. A hundred year ago, back on 1914, May 14th, the first Alberta oil well was drilled which turned Alberta’s fortunes (Hussain, 2014). This meaningful extraction well, not only led to explorer the fossil fuel beneath the ground, but also explored the potential of the land to provide bulk oil productions and bright economic benefits far into the future. According to the geological surveys in 2012 (OPEC), Alberta is the third largest oil reservoir in the world following after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. The total oil reserved in Alberta is around 170 billion barrels (BBL),

With thousands of oil wells drilled and billions of barrels of oil extracted, Alberta becomes the heart of Canadian energy. The energy industry provides tremendous opportunities for companies to involve in the extraction and processing of Alberta’s energy resources (Government of Alberta, 2018). Production and export of local oil and gas have become the critical economic profit to the province.

Since 1963, approximately 450,000 oil wells have been drilled throughout Alberta. These wells are at the variable stage of their life cycle (Government of Alberta, 2018). By May 2017, there were around 185,000 (41%) active wells, 17,000 (4%) inactive wells, 72,000 (16%) suspended wells, 67,000 (15%) abandoned wells and around 109,000 (25%) reclamined wells (Dachis & Shaffer ect, 2017) in Alberta (Figure 5). Moreover, within any stage of well drilling processes, some oil wells end up to become orphan wells: oil wells have no legally responsible or financially able party to deal with their proper abandonment and the reclamation of their site” (Dachis & Shaffer ect, 2017), at any time of a well life cycle under the influence of external legal and socio-economic factors.

These oil and gas wells in Alberta have potential to threat on the health of the local land, water, wildlife, and human population. Once the well site management fails to regulate well development and petroleum hydrocarbon extraction activities, soil and groundwater have the potential to be polluted by the well site contaminants including herbicides residue that used for land clearing, toxic chemical additives that were added during the well drilling process, resistant petroleum hydrocarbons from the extraction processes or accidental spills, heavy metals from site equipment, and salt from geological minerals that have been brought up by produced water to the land surface. Eventually, these contaminated lands and water fail in their ecological functions in terms of providing a healthy ecosystem, and security of local drinking and irrigation water.

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