Photo Essay

Life alongside the impacts of Alberta’s fracking boom

Locals say the creeks are dry and the roads are ruined. Here’s what life is like in a rural Albertan fracking hot spot

By Drew Anderson

Photography by Amber Bracken

Drew Anderson has reported on climate and the environment, with a particular focus on oil and gas and electricity in Alberta, for The Narwhal since 2021. He is based in Calgary.

Oct. 15, 2026 6 min. read

It is easy to get lost in the numbers when talking about fracking in Alberta: to be temporarily dazzled by the growth of production, the insatiable thirst for water and the profits that follow. 

The practice has seen a dramatic increase over the past 13 years, with production rising sevenfold between 2013 and 2024 to the equivalent of more than 640 million barrels of oil per year. Water consumption also soared 335 per cent, from 6.5 billion litres to almost 30 billion litres of freshwater per year.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is an oil and gas extraction method that involves injecting water deep underground to break up rock formations where gas is trapped. The practice is booming in rural Alberta.

Those sorts of figures are almost impossible to comprehend. You could count how many swimming pools that water might fill (164 million), or try to imagine a stack of barrels teetering high into the atmosphere, but what does that really mean?

In parts of rural Alberta, you don’t need those kinds of mental gymnastics to understand the scale of the industry and its impact. The evidence is all around you. Creeks run dry. Hoses and pumps seem to line every ditch. Then there are the trucks and drilling and noise.

The state of local roads — sometimes heavily pitted by trucks associated with the fracking industry — is a frustration to Daniel Iseli-Otto. “This is industrial pulverization of county roads,” he says.
A water line runs to a fracking reservoir under a muddy gravel road.

This is particularly true in the rural areas of west-central Alberta, a long stretch of the province sandwiched between the foothills to the west and the frenetic Calgary-Edmonton corridor to the east.

It’s here where ranches, farms and communities sit side by side with a fracking boom that is outcompeting the locals for water.

In west-central Alberta, oil and gas infrastructure is a common sight on ranches and farms.

What we saw this summer

Looking back on the past ten years, the summer of 2026 was an anomaly for the area of Alberta an hour drive southwest of Edmonton. Parched fields were inundated with rain early in the season, and rivers and creeks flowed with renewed vigour. Some areas received more rainfall than ever before.

The summer of 2026 happened to be a rainy one in Alberta. But drought years are predicted to return and locals are worried about their communities’ water supplies.

But that moisture wasn’t enough to quell concerns from some residents in the Blindman and Medicine River watersheds, where fracking activity has been increasing — and water concerns are front and centre. 

The fracking industry in Alberta consumes almost 30 billion litres of water each year.

Fracking involves injecting water deep into the ground to break up rock where gas is trapped in tight crevasses, often thousands of metres under the surface. That water, vast quantities of it, is almost entirely lost to the water cycle as it remains trapped in the reservoirs that previously held gas. The water that does come to the surface is contaminated.

The Narwhal spent a day travelling through the Rimbey, Alta., area with Daniel Iseli-Otto and Assar Grinde, two members of the Blindman River Watershed Society, in July this year, visiting impacted landowners, following pumping hoses to enormous reservoirs and stopping for a photoshoot among Grinde’s cattle.

Fracking operations often require massive reservoirs to supply them with enough water.
This reservoir was built next to wetlands and across from Butch and Nicole Smith’s bison ranch near Rimbey, Alta.

There’s an image in many a head of what kind of people raise concerns over oil and gas. Former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney often dismissed those with environmental concerns as “foreign-funded radicals,” but those stereotypes don’t hold.

A man with a white handlebar moustache leans on a bannister in a home with a stuffed caribou head on the wall.
Butch Smith blames the construction of a nearby fracking reservoir for the decline of his bison herd.

Butch and Nicole Smith, who live in the area, blame the construction of a massive reservoir across from their isolated property for the decline of their bison herd. They’re moving. 

Grinde, whose family has owned its ranch for generations, talks about watching the creek on that land dry up and how the oil and gas companies were still pumping water for fracking while he was left with mud. 

There’s a stereotype of oil and gas critics in Alberta; former premier Jason Kenney called them “foreign-funded radicals,” for example. But those stereotypes aren’t accurate.

Iseli-Otto curses as we turn onto another gravel road, heavily pitted from the trucks moving back and forth from a fracking reservoir site. “This is industrial pulverization of county roads,” he says, as he slows down in his Ram 3500 pickup truck.

Dana Kreil is chair of the Medicine River Watershed Society near Rimbey. She’s not opposed to fracking, but wants the province to ensure the industry doesn’t deplete local water resources.

Dana Kreil, the chair of the nearby Medicine River Watershed Society, and a councillor for Lacombe County, jumped in Iseli-Otto’s truck in the afternoon. She says the road in front of her home was “trashed” by one company active in the area.

“I want them to get a bill,” she says.

Not just fracking, not just the Blindman

Travelling through rural Alberta, it feels like the frustrations that come alongside the pay cheques and the royalties of the broader oil and gas industry are increasing in step with a years-long trend of companies failing to pay their share — whether they frack wells or not. 

Even with record profits, investments and jobs don’t stack up the way they used to. Too often, oil and gas companies fail to pay their bills, and that has consequences. Unpaid municipal taxes hurt local governments — and eat into budgets for things like road maintenance — and unpaid leases force landowners to seek government compensation on behalf of delinquent companies. At the same time, there are more and more orphan and inactive wells. 

All of those local impacts intertwine with the changing climate and the associated droughts, fires and floods.

Assar Grinde says he watched fracking companies continue to draw water near his family-owned ranch, even after a local creek ran dry.

Grinde says no one really thinks of the water the companies pull from the rivers and underground aquifers until there’s not enough to go around, and then it becomes a priority. And although the summer of 2026 was altogether too wet for many farmers, the drought years are predicted to return as part of a longer-term pattern of increased volatility. 

The cause of those swings in climate are once again related to big numbers that are hard to grasp. 

$168 billion in revenue. $22 billion in royalties the government relies on. 310 billion litres of water consumed by Alberta’s oil and gas industry. Then there’s the five billion tonnes from global oil and gas production, seven billion tonnes from transportation and the unfathomable heating of oceans. 

The immediate impacts of fracking may be most visible in rural communities, but that doesn’t mean big cities aren’t affected.

The big picture is abstract; hard to fathom. But here at Blindman Creek, the impacts are tangible. 

“It’s really obvious that it’s an issue, but it’s really hard to make it concrete for people,” Iseli-Otto says. “This is an issue for people in Calgary, this is an issue for people in Edmonton, but they don’t know. The amount of water that’s getting sucked out is mind blowing.”