Home » Posts tagged 'Ben Parfitt'

Tag Archives: Ben Parfitt

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

Fort Nelson’s Gas Boom Went Bust. Who’s Going to Clean Up?

August 4, 2020

Fort Nelson’s Gas Boom Went Bust. Who’s Going to Clean Up?

Ottawa has announced money to clean up the oil and gas industry’s old wells and infrastructure, but critics say it’s not enough.

Fort-nelson-main.jpg
The Cabin gas plant expansion was supposed to provide jobs near Fort Nelson. Now it sits idle. Photo by Garth Lenz.

In the face of the economic fallout from COVID-19, it’s easy to forget that some communities in British Columbia were in deep fiscal distress long before the pandemic began.

Fort Nelson is a good example, and a textbook case of why senior levels of government need to be mindful when they roll out recovery plans such as the announced $1.7 billion in federal funding to address cleanup costs at aging oil and natural gas wells.

In 2008, B.C.’s northernmost city was rocked by news that logging and sawmilling giant Canfor was closing two panel mills. Four hundred and thirty five men and women, among the highest paid workers in their community, lost their jobs. The mills never reopened.

851px version of canfor.jpg
For 14 years, Canfor’s massive PolarBoard mill has stood idle on the outskirts of Fort Nelson. Hopes that gas extraction would provide new jobs were soon dashed. Photo by Garth Lenz.

The fossil fuel equivalent of a gold rush owed its roots to developments in distant Texas where companies had figured out how to force oil and gas out of stubborn shale rock by blasting it with tremendous volumes of water, sand and chemicals in fracking operations. With that innovation, a wave of drilling and fracking for “shale oil” and “shale gas” swept across North America. 

Before long Encana, Apache, Nexen, Chevron and other energy companies swarmed Fort Nelson. The city’s main street buzzed with pickup trucks, its hotels and restaurants were fully booked, and the bar tabs ran high.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Quake Threat to Dams Posed by Fracking Was Long Warned

January 11, 2020

The Quake Threat to Dams Posed by Fracking Was Long Warned

A new trove of internal exchanges shaken loose by Ben Parfitt amplifies decades of safety urgings.

F3CBA861-9E63-4AF0-8300-138E5879B955.jpeg
A ‘shake map’ shows a magnitude 4.5 earthquake that hit northern BC late in 2018, likely caused by fluid injection. The map was created by Gail Atkinson, an expert who called for ‘no frack zones’ around dams. Illustration created by Gail Atkinson. Additional labels by The Tyee.

“Why is this so difficult?” a BC Hydro dam safety engineer plaintively asked his superiors seven years ago.

He’d been stymied again in proposing that because the risks of earthquakes caused by fracking were clear, preventing disaster required creating “no frack” zones around dams.

His sense of urgency runs through a long thread of discussions within BC Hydro and the Oil and Gas Commission surfaced by investigative researcher Ben Parfitt.

For years now the two crown agencies have been reluctant to publicly talk about the risks earthquakes triggered by the oil and gas industry pose to critical dam infrastructure throughout northeastern B.C.

But a freedom of information request by Parfitt at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has shed new light on what has been a long and often acrimonious internal debate.

Hundreds of emails, letters, memos and meeting notes released by the utility in response to Parfitt’s request and his just published investigationmake the following important revelations:

Officials at BC Hydro have been concerned about the shale gas industry since 2007 when coal bed methane extraction resulted in seismic activity at the Peace Canyon Dam near Hudson Hope. 

The Peace Canyon Dam, which provides six per cent of the province’s electricity, is built on fragile shale rock and wasn’t built to withstand even modest earthquakes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Dam(n) Big Fracking Problem

December 23, 2017

A Dam(n) Big Fracking Problem

Regulators left behind as industry built dozens of unauthorized dams — many at risk of failure.

FrackingDamWarningSign.jpg
The province’s Environmental Assessment Office has ordered Progress Energy to drain almost all water from this seven-storey dam, built without required approvals. The company is now seeking a retroactive exemption from the assessment process. Photo by Ben Parfitt.

More than half of 48 dams that oil and gas companies built in recent years without first obtaining the proper permits had serious structural problems that could have caused many to fail.

And now, the BC Oil and Gas Commission, which appeared to be asleep at the switch in allowing the unlicensed dams to be built in the first place, is frantically trying to figure out what to do about them after the fact.

Information about the unprecedented, unregulated dam-building spree is contained in a raft of documents that the commission released in response to freedom of information requests filed by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

The documents obtained by the CCPA, along with other materials recently posted on the OGC’s website, reveal that 28 of at least 48 unlicensed dams on Crown (meaning public) lands had significant structural flaws or other problems belatedly identified by commission staff.

All the dams were built to trap fresh water used by energy companies drilling and fracking for gas in northeast B.C. In some fracking operations in the region, companies are pressure-pumping the equivalent of 64 Olympic-size swimming pools of water underground to break open gas-bearing rock formations, triggering earthquakes in the process.

The OGC paved the way for the construction of the dams by granting companies numerous permits under the Land Act to use public lands to “store water.”

But in approving the applications, commission personnel failed to ask basic, critical questions: How did companies intend to store the water? In tanks? In pits? Behind dams?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress