This is a story about our most precious natural resource -
water.
The Groundbirch Venture is located in northeast BC, or British Columbia,
and it's situated near the communities
of Dawson Creek, Fort St. John
and the village of Chetwynd.
In an area susceptible to water shortage,
Shell needed a reliable water supply for their Groundbirch Venture.
Groundbirch is a very large piece of land, about 30 by 50 kilometres,
that has a big resource in it of clean natural gas.
There's not only production coming from it which is about enough
for two and a half million homes when it's fully up and running,
it will also live for about 40 years of production life
and we want to do all that in a safe and responsible manner.
The Groundbirch area is like many other communities -
it centres around water availability or access to water.
The ranching and farming community that's here has told us repeatedly
how important water is to their lifestyle.
One of the issues that we have is, the oil and gas industry requires a lot of water.
With the community really growing right now,
it's something we really have to be cognisant of
to make sure that it's a sustainable resource.
The solution is a partnership with the community,
reclaiming their waste water for industrial and municipal use.
A large portion of our water demand is hydraulic fracturing,
it's the method which we use to unlock the natural gas in the tight gas rock.
Hydraulic fracturing is water intensive.
The gas itself is trapped in the shale -
in order to get it out of the shale you need a large volume of water
to actually generate enough hydraulic force to fracture the formation.
On a typical well, each of the fractures themselves
takes around 800 cubic metres of water.
We minimise the use of fresh water through recycling of the existing water
that we have in the system.
What you can see here is actually a big part of that.
On the one side we have a pond that holds nothing but produced water
and this is water that comes back from our wells following the fracking process.
Although we try to reuse that water, we will always have a need to make up extra water.
We were using water from ponds which are also used to actually water cattle,
and we would draw water from the river.
We were looking as a company for better sources of water
that were less taxing on the environment and the community
and, at that time, it happened to line up that the city of Dawson Creek
came out with a proposal to seek industry support for making more of their waste water.
We had a discussion around council and it was actually somewhat in jest we made a joke that,
"What if we used the water at our sewer lagoon?"
Shell came forward with a really great proposal
of how they could partner with the community, partner with the city
and we'd be able to make a project that was something that would benefit all of us.
The partnership involved Shell funding the development of a new water treatment plant
to prepare the city's waste water for discharge back into the environment.
They also built a new pumping station and pipeline
to transport a proportion of the reclaimed water to Groundbirch - 48 kilometres away.
We partnered with the city to treat the water to a standard
that would essentially allow the city to use that water to water lawns,
service other industrial users, and we would be one of those industrial users.
Getting the trucks off the road by piping the water to the field and inside of the field
is seen as a huge win for the community.
By being able to move water through a water distribution system,
we've taken out 100 trucks a day of truck transport traffic.
The model is one where you really try and understand challenges
and issues and desires between different groups,
and, in this case, it was the community at large here and Shell.
And I think that's something Shell is very good at doing.
Behind me, you see the McLeod Community Hall and Elementary School.
This is where we work together with community members
to drive solutions for some of the issues
that are borne by the oil and gas activity around the community
and try and find creative ways that we can reduce our impacts.
The city of Dawson Creek has been very fortunate over the last couple of years
to win numerous national awards about being one of the greenest cities in Canada.
We're doing that in the middle of an economic boom around the natural gas industry.
I use that as a real bragging point, that you can actually have both.
You can be sustainable, it's all about balance and it's about working together.
This is a very innovative project, where we've teamed up with the municipality.
From Shell's perspective we have access to a resource that would've otherwise been wasted.
From the city's perspective, they now have potentially a revenue stream as well.
This project is a big win-win, I'm proud that I'm part of that.
Lots of cities we know have tried to engage with Dawson Creek,
to copy this and make more out of their waste water,
so I have good hope that both in Shell as well as in the wider nation,
that some people will follow the thinking like this.
This has been one of those amazing projects,
that started with a small idea, that has not only worked out for Shell,
but it's going to be beneficial for decades to come for the city of Dawson Creek.