Foundry Spatial Ltd.
October 30, 2014
Executive Summary
The successful development of unconventional resources in Alberta will require access to substantial volumes of water. This water may be sourced from saline or non-saline groundwater, surface water, recycled industrial water, or treated municipal wastewater, among other sources. A key difference between shale gas development and other industrial uses, is the length of time that an individual water source may be required. The primary consumption of water occurs during a small window of time, associated with the hydraulic fracturing based stimulation of a well. For a single well, this use may occur over a period of days to weeks, or for a multi-well pad, this centralized demand may extend to several months or years. Following the stimulation of the wells at any given location, the water demand will stop, and then re-emerge at a different location where new drilling is occurring. Considering surface water resources, for a long term industrial user of water at a single location, substantial effort can be put into an evaluation of the hydrology associated with a given site, and that effort will only need to be expended once. For smaller, transitory water demands such as those associated with shale gas development, a desire may exist to rapidly evaluate multiple potential sites, both to identify the potential resource and also to identify existing water users in an area. In order to quickly and most accurately estimate the potential resource, a continuous estimation of runoff across the landscape is required. The second year of the WCAB project, and the work described in this report, undertook to create a continuous estimate of surface water resources across 142,000 km2 of western Alberta. The modeling process was tailored to the specific regulatory environment in Alberta by modeling long-term normal runoff conditions at the weekly time step, and also by estimating low flow parameters required for the implementation of A desk-top method for establishing environmental flows in Alberta rivers and streams (Locke and Paul, 2011). This report summarizes work undertaken in Year 2 of the WCAB project. In Year 1, a large amount of data was compiled, processed, and analyzed to build a foundational understanding of the streamflow hydrology and various components of the hydrologic cycle. This data provided the framework for the hydrologic modeling undertaken in Year 2. Significant progress was also made in building improved understandings of the saline and non-saline groundwater resources of the project study area in both years of the WCAB project. Reports describing these activities are available on the project website. The Project is a joint initiative of Petrel Robertson Consulting, Foundry Spatial, and Strategic West Energy, and is supported by the Petroleum Technology Alliance of Canada, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, Canadian Natural Resources, Cequence Energy, Chevron Canada Resources, ConocoPhillips Canada, Encana Corporation, Husky Energy, Mosaic Energy, NuVista Energy, Penn West Petroleum, Shell Canada and Talisman Energy.