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When Alycia Aird drives from Moberly Lake, B.C., heading east through the traditional homelands of the Saulteau and West Moberly Lake First Nations, she sees remnants of the oil and gas industry everywhere.
“It’s just dotted all over with lease sites and roads and [oil and gas] features all fragmenting the landscape,” she said. Every hundred metres or so, Aird spies gas rigs, tree clearings or job sites. Some are still active — many are not.
Aird’s homelands, about 750 kilometres northeast of Vancouver, is littered with thousands of old wells that are no longer producing oil or gas. Each well site has disturbed local ecosystems, and has the potential to contaminate nearby water sources and emit planet-warming gases.
But for Aird, a member of Saulteau First Nations, each site also presents an opportunity to rewild her homelands. Aird is the general manager of Aski Reclamation LP, a First Nations corporation that employs local Indigenous people to restore the Saulteau and West Moberly First Nations’ homelands.
Since its inception in 2019, the company has earned contracts to reclaim land degraded by oil and gas, mining and forestry.
“These are people who are going to go back to the land when oil and gas companies decide to leave,” Aird said. “People here are invested long-term with the objective of having land that supports them and their cultural activities.”
The Peace River region of B.C., in the northeast corner of the province, has been a hotbed of oil and gas extraction since at least the 1950s. Prospectors dug holes straight down into the ground, hoping to hit a deep formation of fluid.
In an effort to reach more oil and gas, rig operators started horizontally fracking to make the oil or gas flow from difficult-to-access rock formations. The practice consumes massive amounts of freshwater and raises long-term water concerns.
Mary Kang, an assistant professor of civil engineering at McGill University who researches oil and gas wells, said once wells are drilled into the ground, often thousands of metres deep, “they’re there forever.” When they are no longer producing oil or gas, the deep hole remains but it is supposed to be permanently sealed off — known in the industry as “abandoning.”
Each of these wells emits methane, a powerful global-warming gas, into the atmosphere. According to a study co-authored by Kang, wells that have been permanently sealed can still emit anywhere from a fraction of a gram to 48 grams of methane per hour. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, that’s about equal to the emissions from burning up to a pound and a half of coal per hour.
To minimize the environmental impacts of a well site, Kang said it needs to be permanently sealed, and the site needs to be reclaimed. However, she adds that often this “could be not done at all — or done poorly.”
The B.C. government requires well owners to outline how they will restore old well sites once they become “dormant,” a classification applied once they have not produced for five years.
For example, owners of wells that become listed as dormant after this year are required to plan for the wells to be restored within 10 years.
But older sites may have not been reclaimed to today’s standards.
Wells can also be temporarily suspended by operators, in the hopes that one day they will produce again — which Kang said rarely happens.
In an email to The Narwhal, B.C. Energy Regulator spokesperson Lannea Parfitt said since 1991, the regulator has recorded 10,661 well suspensions from permit holders. This includes oil and gas wells that may have been suspended more than once. Previously suspended wells have been brought back into production 753 times.
According to the regulator’s website, the average lifespan of an oil and gas well is about 20 years. At present, there are more than 9,100 permanently sealed oil and gas wells in B.C. Approximately 6,500 more have been suspended and 1,000 sit inactive. According to Kang’s research, there are about 370,000 non-producing oil and gas wells across the country.
When an oil and gas well permit holder goes bankrupt, the well becomes “orphaned” and it falls to the regulator to manage the site. In an email to The Narwhal, a spokesperson for the regulator said there are 819 orphan sites in B.C., 78 per cent of which have been permanently sealed.
Even after a well has been sealed, contaminants in the surrounding soil and water need to be cleaned up and the land around the well still needs to be reclaimed, as well sites often have been cleared of trees and native plants and the soil has been compacted. Reclaiming an old well site takes several years.
The province’s budget says the regulator aims to hire or collaborate with Indigenous groups to reclaim 30 orphaned well sites by the end of 2025, and 75 more by the end of 2027. It aims to reclaim all orphaned sites by 2030.
According to a 2023 report from the International Energy Agency, there are more than 5,500 orphan wells across Canada.
Teena Demeulemeester, supervisor for the Saulteau First Nations’ treaty rights and environmental protection department, said in the mid-2010s, she saw oil and gas companies trying to restore well sites. But at the time, she said, reclamation efforts on her homelands were not incorporating Traditional Knowledge.
She remembers visiting several former well sites where grass seed had been scattered atop earth compacted by heavy machinery, like bulldozers and excavators.
“They were fields of just grass. It wasn’t coming back to a natural habitat,” Demeulemeester said. “The grass mat choked out any trees or traditional plants, because it was so thick and so overtaking.”
Animal patterns started changing, too. Demeulmeester said the nations are currently collecting data on caribou trails. Despite reclamation efforts, Aird said many members have told her they haven’t been able to hunt animals the nations have traditionally relied on for sustenance.
“They haven’t felt comfortable hunting moose here based on how much oil and gas [contamination] is happening,” Aird said. “When they’ve harvested moose, there’s been a large amount of concern with tumours on the organs.”
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Demeulemeester said she saw money was being put into reclamation. But the Saulteau First Nations weren’t looped in.
“First Nations were not involved in the process,” she said. “Reclamation was occurring and we didn’t have any input.”
So, in the late 2010s, the Saulteau First Nations held meetings with members to ask the communities what they wanted to see on their homelands. One of the key objectives identified in the meetings was for the nations to start a reclamation company of their own.
In 2019, the B.C. Energy Regulator, then the B.C. Oil and Gas Commission, hired the First Nations to reclaim an orphan well pad east of Moberly Lake, between the Peace and Pine Rivers, about 750 kilometres northeast of Vancouver.
Aird said when she first arrived at the site, the area was sparse. The former wetland had been cleared of vegetation and only a few cattails had sprung up while the well pad sat unused.
A team of seven field workers and a contract ecologist studied how water previously flowed through the site. They carved a winding creek bed into the ground. To help the site retain water, they dug out a small pond.
By consulting Elders and members, the Saulteau First Nations collected data on plants used for sustenance, medicine and more. The nations compiled information dating back at least 50 years, and created a database of trees, shrubs and grasses that are native to their homelands.
With this knowledge, the reclamation team identified what plants needed to be re-introduced to the site. They planted several native species, including black spruce trees and cottonwood. They reintroduced willow and red osier dogwood, which Aird says are important for moose.
Five years later, Aird said native animals have returned to the site, too. She leads tours of the site so Saulteau First Nations Elders can see how the land has changed. The bare well pad has been transformed into a thriving wetland.
“Every time I go to the site, I seem to see a bear that’s hanging out there,” Aird said. “There’s frogs all over the ground, there’s birds chirping; it’s an ideal candidate for what restoration looks like.”
With that pilot project, Aski Reclamation was born.
Since then, the company has grown to a team of 42 staff. The B.C. government has granted the company significant contracts to reclaim former well sites across Saulteau First Nations’ homelands.
In an email to The Narwhal, a spokesperson for the B.C. Energy Regulator said it has hired Aski Reclamation to work on 10 more orphan sites. The regulator has added the company to its list of approved vendors for orphan well reclamation.
“The success of Aski is an example of how collaboration can lead to positive outcomes as we work together to reclaim and heal the land,” the spokesperson wrote.
The well site reclamation business is only expected to grow. As of 2024, B.C. requires oil and gas permit holders to have restored 40 per cent of their wells that were dormant in 2019.
According to a 2021 report for the regulator, more than 16,000 oil and gas wells in the province will need to be permanently sealed in the coming decades. About 14,000 of those are “unconventional” wells, built in the hydraulic fracturing boom of the early 2000s.
While some clients have suggestions about how a site should look after being reclaimed, or may even provide seedlings, Aird said Aski Reclamation usually has full control over their end product. (Aski Reclamation declined to provide details on their clients, citing confidentiality and business relationships.)
The only limiting factor, Aird said, is budget. It means the company might not get to add a feature, like a pond or a creek, to the site, or monitor the site for several years.
“Not all companies have been planning for this change and for a restoration economy,” Aird said. “They only have so much budget. So we try really hard to be as economically feasible as possible and make sure that we do a good job.”
Every year, Aird returns to the well pad east of Moberly Lake to monitor how it’s rewilding.
“There’s water going through it and there’s all this wildlife. There are [animal] footprints everywhere and frogs. You can hear birds,” she said. “It is a huge stark contrast in comparison to all the well sites that you drive by to get to this one.”
While it thrives now, the future of the site is still uncertain.
According to Kang, part of that puzzle includes the quality of the well plug. In her research, she’s found that some poorly plugged wells can leak more methane into the atmosphere than unplugged wells. Other properly plugged wells can start to leak, in the event of an earthquake or similar land disturbance.
Aski Reclamation doesn’t plug wells. Instead, owners need to plug the well themselves or hire another contractor before asking Aski to rewild the land. And once an operator plugs the well, Kang said the regulator considers them “off the hook.”
“We don’t know about the integrity of the plugs, and we don’t know what will happen 50 years down the road,” Kang said. She said it’s not clear how regulators can manage these sites, but that monitoring wells may be a solution.
The company has branched out to other reclamation projects. It earned a contract to contribute to Natural Resources Canada’s 2 Billion Trees program, and plants native trees to reclaim swathes of forest cleared for obsolete forest service roads.
This year, according to Aski Reclamation’s restoration division manager Stacy Hammond, the company has 12 planting projects on the go, some of which include multiple sites. They have also started to restore former mining sites.
With every project, the landscape seems a little less fragmented. Some members of Saulteau First Nations are returning to reclaimed sites for cultural practices, according to Demeulemeester. She said it seems like Aski Reclamation is starting to reverse the disturbances oil and gas have caused on their homelands.
“Restoration and reclamation is occurring now,” Demeulemeester said. “And it’s healing the land.”
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