Abandoned Hants County oil well not cleaned up after 11 years
Community wonders about regulator
Kimm Kent discovered that there was an 11 year old abandoned oil well site in her community. The site was never reclaimed.
Last night, over 70 people
attended a community meeting on fracking in Centre Burlington, Hants
County. The meeting itself was spearheaded by Kimm Kent. Attendees
included members of Glooscap First Nation.
Guest speaker was Jennifer
West of the Ecology Action Centre and Coordinator of NOFRAC, who Kent
had recently met at a Federation of Agriculture meeting.
The tipping point that got
Kent, a Cogmagun, Hants County resident to organize the community
meeting was the surprising information that there was an 11 year old
abandoned oil well site in her own community. She asked neighbours where
it was, and her family hiked along a back woods road to find it.
When they found it, Kimm's first question was: “Who is responsible for this?”
The Cogmagun # 1 oil well
site is off a well traveled woods road in Cogmagun, Hants County. The
100 metre by 100 metre wellpad is on moderately sloped terrain. The
wellpad itself has to be level, and this was achieved by excavating all
the soil and subsoil from the western high end, and depositing it on the
lower end.
The entire surrounding area
had been clear-cut not long before the 2003 drilling of the oil well.
Natural regeneration has developed healthy sized young trees all around
the wellpad. But due to the compacting by all the heavy equipment in
building the wellpad, and the irregularity of the churned up soil
material, nothing is growing on the site.
The excavation and leveling
of the wellpad was a substantial undertaking. So would be its
restoration to the previously existing state that is explicitly required
in the drilling permits granted by the province's Department of Energy.
Eleven years after the
abandonment of the well, that has not been done, and, not surprisingly,
there is heavy erosion of the filled soil material.
The only required activity
that has been completed is the removal of the wellhead when the well was
abandoned. Hopefully, that was capped as required before it was buried.
That remains to be determined, and is not always done properly in a
loosely regulated environment where there is little or no oversight by
regulators.
The site hosts a very large
do-it-yourself holding tank cut out of a piece of scrapped industrial
equipment. Next to it is a tailing pond lined with black plastic. The
long decayed liner with cattails growing through it is of the thickness
used by gardeners, rather than of the far heavier grades used, for
example, in fracking waste ponds.
The metal holding tank was
presumably for mixing drilling muds, and the tailing pond was for
discharging the used muds returned up the well during drilling. Drilling
muds and the waste water returned tend to be more toxic than fracking
waste water, because of the concentrations of the chemicals used. The
disposal of both of them is regulated. But what actually happened with
those Cogmagun # 1 wastes, and the regulatory oversight of that, is
another question that the Department of Energy will have to address.
The tank and the tailing
pond with the decrepit liner that has cattails growing through it are
both full of rainwater. But even 11 years later the sludge at the bottom
may still have significant concentrations of hazardous substances used
in the drilling, and of the naturally occurring toxins brought back up
with the material from the drilled well bore.
All of these issues are supposed to be taken care of in the required abandonment and site reclamation.
Who is responsible for this?
The 2003 drilling was done
by Oiltec Resources of Calgary. The land is part of the large Windsor
Block Exploration Lease that includes the later wells drilled and
fracked in Kennetcook and Noel. That lease was held at the time by
Contact Exploration, who are now active in New Brunswick.
Oiltec's drilling agreement
was what is called a 'farm-in' to Contact's exclusive right to explore
the Windsor Block. And typical of such arrangements, Contact also
chipped in 10% of drilling and reclamation costs for 10% ownership of
any resource found and developed.
When Oiltec decided it did
not want to drill another exploratory well, it traded it's 90% ownership
of a share of any prospective future successful efforts by other
companies to Contact, in return for Contact assuming sole responsibility
for site reclamation.
So Contact got the benefits
and for six years did nothing about site reclamation, apparently
without any oversight from the regulator. The company president at the
time was Darcy Spady, now Vice President of St. Brendan's Exploration
that holds Nova Scotia's newest exploration leases along the North
Shore.
Darcy Spady has given
numerous interviews and public presentations where he lauds his company
and the industry as good corporate citizens.
Triangle Petroleum took
over as the active operator of the Windsor Block lease in 2007, because
of the opportunity they saw in shale gas development. Contact
Exploration retained a minority interest in ownership of that lease.
In 2009 Triangle bought out Contact's remaining ownership interest in the Windsor Block lease. The legal agreement does
not have many detailed items in it, but Darcy Spady and Contact
Exploration made sure that Triangle was assuming legal responsibility
for the Cogmagun oil well.
At the same time, investors
behind Triangle Petroleum recruited experienced oil industry executive
Peter Hill to be on that company's Board and to lead the turn-around of
the by then financially troubled company. Peter Hill has been the very
public and accessible Chief Executive of Triangle while it has been
navigating the contentious issues of cleaning up its Kennetcook sites of
the wells fracked in 2008.
Peter Hill did not sign the
agreement with Contact and did not then have executive authority with
Triangle. But that agreement with Contact was an essential piece of
consolidating Triangle's position that it's investors had tasked him
with.
Triangle Petroleum drilled
five wells into the shale bed in 2007 and 2008. All wellpad sites that
are not further developed are required to be fully reclaimed before the
permits for operating on the sites expire. All five of Triangle's
original permits have expired. None have had any reclamation.
Reclaiming two of those
wellpads has been complicated by lack of agreement over how to dispose
of the wastes in the holding ponds on them. But the other three wellpads
do not have holding ponds, and no reclamation has been done there
either. Neither the company nor the regulator- Department of Environment
in this case- has ever publicly given a reason for the lack of
reclamation.
Because of public scrutiny
that began in 2011, the situation of those five Triangle wells has at
least been more or less out in the open, even if not explicitly
acknowledged. But the Cogmagun well site has been sleeping out of sight
while Triangle has had sole legal responsibility for the last five
years.
Where has the regulator been all this time ?
To Kimm Kent's basic “Who
is Responsible For This?” question, the answer appears to be clear.
Triangle Petroleum, already of fracking fame in Nova Scotia, seems to
have sole legal responsibility for the Cogmagun #1 reclamation that has
not been done.
But where has the regulator
been for 11 years? There are about two onshore oil or gas wells drilled
per year for them to supervise. There appears to be a lot of
Departmental staff time for promoting oil and gas development, and for
facilitating companies getting their permits to drill.
Kimm Kent has submitted a
Freedom of Information request for documentation about the Cogmagun # 1
well. It remains to be seen whether there is any documentation to
establish whether the Department of Energy has been aware of the
situation at the Cogmagun well site, and whether the regulator had taken
any steps to ensure that Oiltec Resources, Contact Exploration, or
Triangle Petroleum met requirements to reclaim the oil well site.
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