Research released by the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health on the health effects of coal-fired power plants was reviewed prior to publication by TransAlta, one of Alberta’s largest utility providers and coal producers, documents released to The Narwhal under the Freedom of Information Act reveal.

More than 550 pages of emails and documents exchanged between TransAlta executives and University of Alberta researcher Warren Kindzierski show the company was heavily involved in assigning, reviewing and publicizing research that would promote the coal industry as the government moved forward with a province-wide coal phase-out.

The correspondence between Kindzierski and TransAlta show the researcher sought input from company executives on draft versions of his research, asking how the company would like to proceed based on his findings. Kindzierski also accompanied TransAlta executives to meetings with government officials where Kindzierski presented slides reviewed in advance by the company.

The documents also show Kindzierski offered pointers for TransAlta communications personnel to consider during the development of company messaging.

In one email to TransAlta, Kindzierski tells officials they will “not be disappointed” in his findings.

“These emails show a pretty close relationship between TransAlta and Dr. Kindzierski, and in some cases show that Dr. Kindzierski was aware of the outcome that TransAlta wanted from his research, which could facilitate bias in his research,” Andrew Read, a professional engineer and former senior analyst with the Pembina Institute who is now working with the city Edmonton’s environmental strategies team, told The Narwhal upon reviewing a portion of the documents.

“What would have happened if the research didn’t align with TransAlta’s interests? Would we have ever seen the publication then?”

TransAlta paid University of Alberta $54,000 for research on health impacts of coal

A previous Freedom of Information request found TransAlta is a regular funder of Kindzierski’s research at the University of Alberta. Those documents revealed TransAlta provided the University of Alberta $54,000 in exchange for research on the health impacts of coal-fired power plants near Edmonton.

The findings of that initial information request prompted The Narwhal to file a secondary request, asking for communications between Kindzierski and TransAlta during the time the research was undertaken.

TransAlta owns and operates Canada’s largest surface strip coal mine, the Highvale Mine. The 12,600-hectare coal mine, managed by TransAlta’s wholly-owned subsidiary Sunhills Mining, produces 13 million tonnes of thermal grade coal each year, which is used to power three of TransAlta’s power stations.

In September 2015 a national air quality study found Alberta had some of the worst air quality levels in Canada due to coal power plants, oil and gas development and vehicle use.

The new tranche of documents show that in light of that study, on September 10, 2015, Oliver Bussler, director of sustainable development at TransAlta, told Kindzierski his research would be “very timely” and asked, “since you are a recognized expert in this area, I was wondering if you have heard what the Environment Ministry may have planned to address the cause of air pollution.”

Kindzierski responded to Bussler’s email saying, “ ‘far-fetched’ would be a good way to characterize the lack of understanding of this issue.”

In April of 2015 the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE), a public health and environmental advocacy group, released a study that showed that, according to government of Alberta figures, levels of harmful air pollution in Edmonton exceeded those of Toronto, a major metropolis with five times the population.

The study showed that during several winter days between 2010 and 2012, levels of particulate matter in Edmonton exceeded legal limits. Fine particulate matter, according to Alberta Environment, measures 2.5 microns or less in diameter. Red blood cells are 5 microns in diameter and the width of an average human hair is roughly 75 microns.

Because of its small size, fine particulate matter, referred to as PM2.5, can accumulate in the respiratory system and dissolve into the bloodstream, leading to chronic health effects and breathing problems.

A broad mix of emissions come from the burning of coal in addition to PM 2.5: SOx, NOx, mercury, cadmium, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and benzenes. These pollutants have significant effects on respiratory and cardiovascular health and some are cancer-causing agents.

Kindzierski has published several studies showing pollutants in the Alberta airshed come from a mix of sources and not just coal. He has used his research to argue coal is being unfairly targeted and that harmful impacts associated with burning coal are overblown.

According to public disclosure records, Kindzierski made $194,670.22 in salary and benefits at the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health in 2016. He made $189,603.06 in 2015.

TransAlta provided at least another $175,000 to the University of Alberta between 2013 and 2015 through additional sponsorship arrangements that are not transparent to the public, raising concerns about the movement of industry funds through public institutions.

‘Remove the slides’

In a series of e-mails between Kindzierski and Bussler the two discussed a presentation Kindzierski would make to Alberta government officials regarding his research.

Kindzierski provided Bussler with a draft version of a presentation, which Bussler said he would review and “provide feedback.”

Kindzierski offered to remove material in his presentation related to the CAPE study: “We can possibly remove the slides related to 2010/CAPE claim.”

Bussler replied: “I have no concerns with including the slides related to 2010/CAPE claim. Since the CAPE claims are on everyone’s’ minds [sic], I think it would be best to address them upfront.”

The documents show Kindzierski made alterations in his presentation in advance of a series of meetings with government officials.

“We have reorganized the presentation, putting the majority of the technical details in the appendix,” Kindzierski wrote to Bussler on September 12, 2015.

“The presentation looks good from my perspective,” Bussler replied. “Since my colleagues are more familiar with the policy maker audience to whom you will be presenting, I’m going to see if they have any final comments on the materials.”

In another e-mail Bussler noted: “It is not my intention to suggest what you should say. The study is very much your work and independent. I do however think it is important how we decided [sic] to relay the information should consider the audience.”

A spokesperson for the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health said as an independent researcher hired by TransAlta, Kindzierski “was obligated to present his findings to TransAlta for preview prior to publication.”

“At the University of Alberta, we value intellectual integrity, freedom of inquiry and expression, and the equality and dignity of all persons as the foundation of ethical conduct in research, teaching, learning, and service,” the spokesperson said.

“It is our position that Kindzierski has acted according to these values and conducted his research and communication of that research, ethically and responsibly.”

Kindzierski declined to provide further comment, saying “all the comments I would have, they were provided by the university officially.”

Read said universities need to take claims of bias in research very seriously.

“It’s critical to resolve and make clear to the public they are providing independent research that can be relied on legitimately,” he said.

Industry-funded research concluded coal-fired power plants safe for health of local residents

Kindzierski’s research, published on TransAlta’s website in the spring of 2016 and bearing the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health insignia, concluded coal-fired power plants near the city of Edmonton do not negatively impact the health of local residents.

In a previous interview Kindzierski said the study had been accepted for publication at three peer-reviewed “high-quality impact journals.”

However, in an e-mail to Don Wharton, TransAlta’s vice-president of policy and sustainability, Kindzierski writes the study accepted for publication is not the one published on TransAlta’s website.

“Our study being published is actually different than what we did last fall; but the news from your perspective is just as good,” Kindzierski wrote to Wharton.

In the same exchange Kindzierski asks Wharton to extend TransAlta’s funding contract for two months. “This allows me to continue funding the research assistant on your contract,” he wrote.

Additional emails exchanged between Kindzierski and Wharton show Kindzierski actively solicited feedback from the company on draft versions of his research.

In an email dated October 15, 2015, Kindzierski provided Wharton with a copy of the draft report. Two days later Kindzierski sent a revised version of the report to Wharton and followed up after a week, asking if company representatives had any response.

“Don, I hope things are going well,” Kindzierski wrote on October 28, 2015. “I would like to check with you about any feedback from the draft report we provided with you [sic]11 days ago and finalizing the report.”

On November 3, Kindzierski wrote Wharton again: “I am just checking again about whether you have any feedback on our report.”

In November 2015 Alberta announced a plan to eliminate the province’s 18 coal-fired power plants by 2030. Alberta uses more coal for power production than all other Canadian provinces combined.

Wharton responded on November 19, saying he had discussed Kindzierski’s findings with the mayors of more than 30 municipalities in Alberta who had expressed concern over the province’s plan to shutter coal plants.

“We have had a request from the mayors…to see the report as soon as it is available,” Wharton wrote to Kindzierski. “You may have noticed that these same mayors have been in the media lately expressing concern about the spectre of accelerated coal plant closures and the effects on their communities.”

In a submission to the Alberta Climate Change Advisory Panel TransAlta referred to Kindzierski’s research as “commissioned independent work through the University of Alberta” that was done “in response to continued unsubstantiated claims that coal-fired generation was a major contributor to Edmonton’s air quality events, and a rationale for the need to accelerate the retirement of coal units.”

Read, now with the City of Edmonton, said it’s clear TransAlta used Kindzierski’s research to lobby municipalities.

“This wouldn’t be a problem if we knew with certainty the research was unbiased,” Read said. “The real worry I see with this specific case is one of disregarding certain perspectives arbitrarily because of whatever interests that individual might have.”

From a public interest perspective, Read added, air quality issues in Alberta are of high concern.

Kindzierski’s research raises questions about the primacy of the public interest in work bearing the University of Public Health’s branding.

Joe Vipond, a physician and board member of CAPE, said he believes Kindzierski’s research was funded explicitly to find evidence there is no effect of burning coal in Edmonton’s airsheds.

“TransAlta, I would surmise, did not fund Kindzierski’s modeling in some altruistic effort to understand the effects of TransAlta’s own coal plants on Edmonton’s airshed,” Vipond said.

“He has even gone so far as to suggest that instead of air pollution being harmful to human health, it is neutral, or even possibly beneficial. This would be analogous to me, as a physician, to stating smoking is good for you.”  

Last year Vipond launched a complaint against Kindzierski with the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA) for violating his professional code of conduct as outlined in the Engineering and Geoscience Professions Act. The Narwhal has learned the investigation into Kindzierski has been ongoing for over 12 months and relates to complaints made by at least one additional individual.

Vipond said he finds it disturbing Kindzierski participated in TransAlta’s presentations to government as a representative of the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health.

“It nauseates me to think our institutions have been corrupted in such a manner.”

Sloan d’Entremont, professional engineer and investigator with APEGA, said the organization’s policy is not to comment on ongoing investigations.

”Due to confidentiality reasons, APEGA Investigations is not able to discuss anything related to complaints that are submitted to the Investigations Department,” she said.

Kindzierski TransAlta Correspondence Excerpts by The Narwhal on Scribd

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The University of Alberta and TransAlta, a major Alberta utility company and coal producer, struck an agreement for the company to pay the university $54,000 to research the health impacts of coal-fired power plants near Edmonton, according to documents obtained by DeSmog Canada.

When TransAlta published the research — a study entitled Investigation of Fine Particulate Matter Characteristics and Sources in Edmonton, Alberta — on its website last spring the company initially stated it had sponsored the work, co-authored by Warren Kindzierski and fellow University of Alberta professor Aynul Bari.

But that sponsorship disclaimer was abruptly scrubbed from the company’s website.

Documents released to DeSmog Canada through Freedom of Information legislation show TransAlta did indeed enter into a sponsorship agreement with the University of Alberta that provided Kindzierski, as principle investigator, $54,000 to conduct the research.

TransAlta says that although it did provide the funds to the university, the university did not use the funds to support Kindzierski’s research.

“They kept our funds but did not use them towards the study, they redirected them elsewhere,” Stacy Hatcher, spokesperson for TransAlta, told DeSmog Canada.

Hatcher said because TransAlta did provide the funds to the university “we erred on the side of being completely transparent and stating up front that we had paid for it as that had been the offer.”

“It was a mistake on our part not to circle back and correct the news story once we learned the university did not accept the funding,” she added.

The undocumented movement of industry money on university campuses is nothing new.

Private sponsorship agreements, gifts, grants and donations have all been used as ways to financially support research, resulting in what some critics have identified as a problematic purchase of academic credibility by corporations.

In this instance, the question comes down to whether and how private funds are influencing public conversations about coal-fired power generation in Alberta.

Industry-Friendly Study Used to Fight Coal Phase-Out

The study, made available to the public on TransAlta’s site in late 2015, bears the branding of the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health and concludes the high number of coal-fired power plants near the city of Edmonton doesn’t negatively impact the health of local residents.

The research has been used by TransAlta to push for an alternative to the Alberta government’s plan to phase-out coal by 2030 (which is no small feat: Alberta uses more coal for power production than all other Canadian provinces combined).

In its submission to the Alberta Climate Change Advisory Panel TransAlta referred to the research as “commissioned independent work through the University of Alberta” that was done “in response to continued unsubstantiated claims that coal-fired generation was a major contributor to Edmonton’s air quality events, and a rationale for the need to accelerate the retirement of coal units.”

“You will see that the research shows minimal airshed impacts from operation of coal-fired generation to the west,” the submission read.

The research has also been used by vocal coal advocates, such as Robin Campbell, president of the Canadian Association of Coal, to argue against a coal phase-out.

TransAlta owns and operates Canada’s largest surface strip coal mine, the Highvale Mine. The 12,600 hectare coal mine, managed by TransAlta’s wholly-owned subsidiary Sunhills Mining, produces 13 million tonnes of thermal grade coal each year which is used to power three of TransAlta’s power stations. Since 2006, TransAlta stopped mining operations at two additional coal mines and as a result now purchases coal from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana.

TransAlta (burns coal and) paid U of A to conduct a health study (about coal). But there’s no connection, OK? https://t.co/SimArg2eOH #ableg

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) November 8, 2016

Corporate Sponsorship Agreements Commonplace

Sponsorship agreements between the University of Alberta and TransAlta are commonplace, Hatcher said: “TransAlta has a relationship with the university, and we have provided non-directed funding in the past for research and academic projects.”

Documents released to DeSmog Canada confirm this, showing TransAlta provided at least another $175,000 to the university between 2013 and 2015 through additional sponsorship arrangements.

However, the retroactive decision to ‘redirect’ the Kindzierski study funds raises questions about transparency and accountability.

The university’s Research Services Office, which appears as a signatory on the TransAlta sponsorship agreement, said it could not provide comment or release information regarding sponsorships.

A woman at the Research Services Office said simply, “We would not release any information to you of any kind” and recommended all inquiries be directed to the principle investigator: Kindzierski.

“No funds were expended [on that study],” Kindzierski told DeSmog Canada. “They were used after the study was done to support a post doctorate RA (research assistant) on other research activities.”

“Are you familiar with soft dollar funded positions? Why don’t you go ahead and learn about that?” Kindzierski said during a phone interview.

‘Soft money’ positions at universities are those funded by grants, awards and other forms of sponsorship that are usually impermanent and must be regularly sought after through application processes. Alternately, ‘hard money’ positions usually refer to tenure-track positions that are funded by tuition, endowments, government funding and philanthropy.

“All faculties, all programs, all departments at all universities have soft dollar funded positions, totally above board and everything,” he added.

Kindzierski said the research, which was published online without going through a full peer-reviewed process, has since been peer-reviewed, accepted and published at three “high-quality impact journals.”

When asked which journals the research appeared in, he responded, “I can name them but I have no desire to give them to you.”

“Go search. That’s good homework for you.”

“You’re no different than a reporter that is too lazy to find this stuff themselves,” Kindzierski said during the interview.

A similar paper by Kindzierski recently appeared in the journal Environmental Pollution, a peer-reviewed publication, but DeSmog Canada was unable to find the exact study in question published anywhere other than TransAlta’s website.

Documentation released to DeSmog Canada via Freedom of Information shows Kindzierski sent TransAlta a proposal of the study before research was undertaken. Records show this proposal was sent to Don Wharton, TransAlta’s vice president of policy and sustainable development, at TransAlta’s request in May 2015. The sponsorship agreement was signed in July 2015. The contents of the study proposal, sent from Kindzierski to Wharton, were redacted in the released documents.

Coal Pollution Still Dangerous to Health, Physician Says

Critics have called the independence of the study into question, saying TransAlta’s planned sponsorship could have introduced bias in the research questions pursued.

“I think after they published it they realized [there were going to be] a lot of people making a stink that there was a conflict of interest,” Joe Vipond, physician with the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE), told DeSmog Canada.

“The optics were quite bad as far as bias is concerned in funding the study and that’s why they moved to make the money trail less obvious.”

Vipond is concerned about the way the study has been used to influence public debate about coal-fired power plants.

“It really distorts the conversation,” he said.

“I work in the medical field… and there is so much evidence of how funding and bias impacts conclusions in the scientific literature in health.”

But, he added, the average person isn’t taught to look as critically at this kind of literature as health professionals are.

“I think it’s very hard. People underestimate the power of money.”

He added that working in the medical field also exposes him to evidence that coal pollution affects respiratory health.

The Kindzierski study goes to great lengths to say pollution in the Edmonton airshed isn’t due to coal-fired power plants, Vipond said.

Recently Vipond co-authored a report, Breathing in the Benefits, released by the Pembina Institute, the Asthma Society, Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment and the Lung Association, that estimated the phase-out of coal by 2030 in Alberta would avoid approximately 600 premature deaths, 500 emergency room visits, 80,000 asthma episodes, two million days of respiratory difficulty for individuals and nearly $3 billion in health benefits.

A previous report from the same group of organizations, A Costly Diagnosis: Subsidizing Coal Power with Albertans’ Health, found pollution from coal combustion affects respiratory and cardiovascular health as well as the central nervous system. The report says exposure to these pollutants can result in chronic respiratory illness and premature death.

“There is such a broad mix of emissions that come from coal: SOx, NOx, particulate matter 2.5 and mercury,” Vipond said.

“Then there’s a whole host of others like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and benzenes. That mix comes out of the stack and there is a lot of evidence for how [those pollutants] pollute lungs and the evidence on the impacts to cardiovascular health is even better.”

Particulate matter 2.5 is so fine, Vipond said, it gets into your lungs and can dissolve immediately into the bloodstream.

Andrew Read, environmental policy analyst with the Pembina Institute and contributor to the Breathing in the Benefits report, told DeSmog Canada there are no safe levels of particulate matter 2.5.

“Particulate matter doesn’t have a lower threshold where health impacts aren’t identified,” he said. “There is no argument that burning coal for electricity does not have substantial health impacts.”

Read added that reality should influence how we think about the future of coal-fired power.

Source: Pembina Institute

“The fact that there is no safe level of exposure to pollutants that are emitted by coal electricity is really important to consider,” he said. “If we expect to grow the economy and add industry to the province we have to remove some of these sources of emissions.”

The Kindzierski study produced for TransAlta “was really a political piece,” Read said.

“That’s the main frustration with the Kindzierski study — he could have added to the conversation or contributed in a way that added to the discussion but didn’t.”

Vipond said a presentation by Kindzierski to the Air and Waste Management Association found the short-term presence of particulate matter in the atmosphere resulted in fewer hospital visits for heart attacks.

“The conclusion was breathing coal-fired pollution is good for your health,” Vipond said.

“My feeling on the matter is that people who already have an agenda then go to find evidence that goes to back up that agenda. I think that’s true of humanity: it’s what we do.”

Vipond published a rebuttal of the Kindzierski study, saying there were major flaws in the methodology, including using limited air quality inputs and wind pattern information.

“I was annoyed [Kindzierski’s study] was out there and annoyed no one was challenging it.”

Research Shows Industry Funding Influences Academic Research

While industry funding doesn’t necessarily influence scientific research, a broad survey of research shows that it often does, according to Garry Gray, assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Victoria.

“If we just look at the outcomes [of research] — and that’s where we should focus — if we look at meta-analyses of funding, we see this in many areas over and over again, the source of funding does matter,” Gray told DeSmog Canada.

Gray spent three years as a research fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard’s Law School studying unethical behaviour in public interest institutions and conducting interviews with researchers in the field of public health and medicine.

His research (which he presents cogently in this TEDx talk) found that, yes, where research money comes from does indeed influence research outcomes.

“There is definitely a funding effect bias that takes place in research, especially when you can show where the funding sources are coming from.”

Gray’s research found that in often minor and subtle ways, researchers found ways to make their findings palatable to their funders.

“It doesn’t mean people were doing unethical research,” Gray said, “it means they were maybe framing their questions in certain ways or asking question A and not question B.”

Gray added universities are trying to better manage the problem of conflict of interest funding, but said they stop short of actually eliminating those funding relationships.

“I think there are a lot of problems today around research funding relationships,” he said.

Many of those ethical problems are not fully resolved by simply asking researchers to sign conflict of interest disclosure forms, he added.

There is often little transparency in how universities accept funding, Gray said, adding that can complicate the issue of public trust.

“Trust is definitely at stake,” he said. “There is this idea that universities are independent and this idea they are, for the most part, serving the public good. So there is this more implicit trust that we have for a project that comes out of the university.”

Yet with increasing amounts of private funds on university campuses, researchers may not be asking “the tougher questions” that are likely to benefit the general public.

“The question is, if we continue to shift funding models, who is going to ask those questions that are not going to be of interest to companies and industry and those types of funders?”

Laurie Adkin, associate professor in the University of Alberta’s Department of political science, told DeSmog Canada there are a lot of concerns about universities’ increasing reliance on corporate funds.

“It has been rather difficult to document the amount of corporate funding for individual researchers and their projects,” Adkins, who is a researcher with the Corporate Mapping Project, said.

“Partly because that information isn’t published anywhere and partly because it is difficult to record unless there is some sort of public announcement made.”

A request for comment from Samantha Pearson, director of corporate and foundation relations at the University of Alberta, went unanswered.

As a part of her research Adkin maps funding of energy-related research at the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary.

There is a significant amount of funding from the fossil fuel industry but also from the federal government at the University of Alberta, Adkin said, adding “a lot of that funding has been going into social licence research or prolonging the life of fossil fuels rather than going into renewable energies.”

“Of course in Alberta the University of Alberta has, at least under its previous president, billed itself as a flagship university for fossil fuel research,” she said.

The University of Alberta used to report industry funding but has since merged that category with funding from public institutions in its annual reporting, so there is no easy way to decipher where funding is coming from.

“You don’t know what faculty is getting what share or what research is getting funded,” she said.

Adkin said the question of the appropriateness of this practice is never raised.

“This is viewed as the model for what everyone should be doing.”

University of Alberta TransAlta Sponsorship Agreement for Kindzierski Coal Study FOI 2016 by DeSmog Canada on Scribd

Update: This piece was updated Thursday, November 10 at 11:46 a.m. to reflect TransAlta’s use of Kindzierski’s research to push for an alternative to Alberta’s Climate Change Plan, not to explicitly argue against the coal phase-out.

With files from Michael Fisher. 

Image: Emissions from a coal-fired power plant chimney in Germany. Photo: Patrick via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

By Ben Parfitt for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Efforts by BC Hydro to ban potentially destructive natural gas company fracking operations in the vicinity of its biggest dams fall well short of what an Alberta hydro provider has achieved, raising questions about why British Columbia isn’t doing more to protect public safety.

Documents obtained through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives show that BC Hydro officials have feared for years that fracking-induced earthquakes could damage its dams and reservoirs.

Senior dam safety officials with the public hydro utility even worried for a time that natural gas companies could drill and frack for gas directly below their Peace River dams, which would kill hundreds if not thousands of people should they fail.

“The Montney gas field has vertical stratification of subsurface [natural gas] rights, so there may actually be a number of different owners laying claim under our damsites,” BC Hydro’s director of dam safety, Stephen Rigbey said in an April 2012 email released in response to the FOI.

No Mandated Frack-free Zones Near Dams

Yet, after years of discussions with B.C.’s Oil and Gas Commission (OGC), which regulates oil and gas industry activities in the province, BC Hydro has obtained only modest commitments to prevent fracking near its two Peace River dams — the massive WAC Bennett dam, which impounds the world’s seventh-largest reservoir, and the smaller Peace Canyon dam downstream.

The restrictions, which BC Hydro’s director of dam safety Stephen Rigbey describes as “an understanding,” also apply to a third dam on the river, the controversial $9-billion Site C project, currently in pre-construction.

Both BC Hydro and the OGC say that the understanding is that “there will be no new tenures” issued to companies wishing to drill and frack for natural gas within five kilometres of BC Hydro’s dams. However, companies holding existing rights would not be prevented from doing so.

“If future activity related to the existing tenures is planned, we will work closely with the Oil and Gas Commission to put restrictions in place to effectively manage any risk,” Rigbey said in an email response to questions.

What those measures would be remains the subject of ongoing discussions. No restrictions are presently in place around any of the massive reservoirs impounded by BC Hydro’s Peace River dams or the lands that could one day surround the Site C reservoir.

In an email response to questions, the OGC said that at this point in time, the Ministry of Natural Gas Development “is not accepting any new requests for subsurface [natural gas] rights within 5 kilometres of the Site C construction area.”

The Commission went on to say that “there are no active hydraulic fracturing operations” within the five kilometres of BC Hydro’s Peace River dams but that there are “a small amount of existing subsurface rights issued within the 5 km buffer zone around Site C.”

“These were issued prior to the creation of the buffer. Any applications in that area, or elsewhere, go through a strict review process before permits are issued. The Commission is also talking with BC Hydro about any additional permit conditions that would be required to protect public safety and the environment in the area specifically, before construction occurs on Site C.”

The measures to date in B.C., fall well short of what Alberta hydro provider, TransAlta, has achieved. In interviews and correspondence with the company, TransAlta revealed that it has effectively shut down all fracking within five kilometres of one of its dams and also around the entire dam’s reservoir as well. And it has succeeded in imposing restrictions on potentially destructive fracking operations in a zone up to ten kilometres away from its damsite.

But, as is the case in B.C., there is nothing in writing to reassure members of the public — no regulation or government statement — banning natural gas companies from fracking near sensitive infrastructure such as hydro dams and reservoirs. Both provinces appear reluctant even to suggest that fracking is inappropriate in certain cases where public safety is concerned, perhaps fearing the precedent such an admission would represent.

“At this time there is no regulated/government mandated exclusion areas near critical infrastructure in Alberta,” says TransAlta’s chief media spokesperson, Stacey Hatcher. Rather, Hatcher says, an “agreement” has been reached to exclude some hydro dams and reservoirs from fracking zones.

Christy Clark’s Conflicting Agendas

BC Hydro’s modest achievements to date come as the Christy Clark government pursues two at times conflicting agendas. On the one hand, the government vows to push its Site C hydro dam, the most expensive infrastructure project in B.C.’s history, “past the point of no return.” On the other, it continues to aggressively push for Malaysian state-owned Petronas to invest billions of dollars to build a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) processing plant near Prince Rupert and to tarnish all those who oppose the project. Should such a plant be built, natural gas drilling and fracking near the Peace River and its hydro facilities would significantly ramp up.

In an April 2012 email, Rigbey likened potential fracking in the Peace to “carpet bombing,” and added that much of the anticipated fracking in future years would occur across the “well-established” regional stress regime.

Even if no such plant materializes in B.C. — an increasing likelihood given the recent announcement that another LNG proponent, Shell, appears ready to scrap its bid to build one — an upswing in natural gas prices would almost certainly result in increased gas drilling and fracking operations, including on lands alongside the reservoir that would be created by the Site C dam, which would flood more than 100 kilometres of the Peace River and its tributaries.

Documents filed by BC Hydro with a panel that reviewed the project for the provincial and federal governments noted that, even in the absence of fracking, nearly 4,000 landslides are expected to dump debris into the reservoir as a result of the Site C dam being built. The 676-page report that discusses those landslide risks makes no mention of additional risks to the reservoir should earthquakes be triggered nearby.

Martyn Brown, a former chief of staff to Premier Clark’s predecessor, Gordon Campbell, says the province’s conflicting agendas underscore a troubling aspect of the government’s regulation of oil and gas industry operations near critical infrastructure. From the outset, Brown says, the OGC has both promoted and regulated oil and gas industry activities. Limiting where companies drill and frack is simply not part of the OGC’s mandate or culture.

Brown likens the OGC to the National Energy Board. “It has a dual role as a proponent of oil and gas development, but also its regulator. And I think there is a fundamental conflict with that,” Brown says. He adds that “political oversight” of the OGC is also problematic because two Cabinet ministers — Energy and Mines Minister, Bill Bennett, and Minister of Natural Gas Development, Rich Coleman — are effectively there to “promote oil and gas activity.”

Concerns for public health and safety should mean that when tensions between the province’s publicly owned hydro utility and the natural gas industry arise it falls to a neutral ministry to determine what activities will be allowed or disallowed near critically important public infrastructure like dams and reservoirs, Brown said.

“Clearly what you need now is an independent voice in cabinet, the Environment Minister, to make broad determinations in an independent way,” Brown said. “The promoter should not be the regulator of oil and gas activities.”

Fracking-induced Earthquakes Cause Alarm

Documents released in response to the FOI request show that in both Alberta and British Columbia hydro providers have become increasingly alarmed at natural gas company incursions onto lands near their dams. The concerns have escalated as distinct clusters of earthquakes in confined areas over short periods of time have occurred in lockstep with fracking operations.

In one email, Rigbey notes that there are “no regulations to stop” oil and gas companies “from injecting into a pre-existing fault” in the rock. In other words, there is a risk that induced fractures could be forced into geologically unstable areas triggering or setting the stage for earthquakes. While gas companies might not want to tap into such faults, Rigbey noted, “accidents can happen.”

In its public pronouncements, however, BC Hydro has been more muted in its concerns. In a 551-page report filed with the joint federal-provincial panel that reviewed the Site C project for example, BC Hydro devoted less than two pages to discussing “petroleum industry-related” earthquakes and it downplayed their threats.

“The Oil and Gas Commission is now establishing procedures and requirements for monitoring and reporting of induced seismicity,” BC Hydro reported to the panel in January 2013. “Each case of induced seismicity will be evaluated on the basis of its unique site-specific characteristics, but it is proposed that hydraulic fracturing would be suspended upon detection of an earthquake of magnitude M4 or larger. It should be noted that earthquakes less than about magnitude M5 do not release enough energy to cause damage to engineered structures.”

In response to written questions, the Oil and Gas Commission said that as a result of discussions with BC Hydro the province “has established a five kilometre buffer area around the WAC Bennett, Peace Canyon and Site C dams.”

Graham Currie, the OGC’s executive director of corporate affairs, added that the Site C dam location is squarely within the Montney Basin, which contains large quantities of shale gas. Gas from dense shale rock formations can only be coaxed from the earth by extensive use of fracking.

Gail Atkinson, an expert on induced earthquakes and a professor in earth sciences at the University of Western Ontario (UWO), says induced earthquakes can be hazardous because they occur much closer to the earth’s surface than do natural earthquakes. If such events happen near dams or other surface structures, the ensuing shaking can be much worse than would be the case with a naturally occurring earthquake of the same magnitude.

The higher the number of fracking-induced earthquakes near dams, the greater the risk that one of them might be sufficiently strong enough to exceed what the dams are engineered to withstand.

“If the frequency of experiencing earthquakes near a dam increases, then the level of expected ground motions at the 1 per cent in 100 year likelihood level will increase,” Atkinson said. She warns that the risk will be greatest “in areas where the hazard was initially low because there is little natural seismicity.”

Atkinson added that even earthquakes of a “moderate” strength could damage dams or other structures if they are induced “at close distances” to such structures.

Such risks are not something that BC Hydro talks about publicly, however. In an on-line video on dam safety, for example, Rigbey talks about the threats to dams from naturally occurring earthquakes but never once even mentions fracking or the increasing number of tremors associated with it.

Alberta’s TransAlta ‘Concerned’ About Fracking Earthquakes Near Dams

Atkinson’s work has clearly influenced TransAlta’s thinking. The company is one of three organizations that funds Atkinson’s fully endowed research chair on hazards associated with induced earthquakes at UWO. The other two are the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council and Nanometrics, a maker of seismic monitoring equipment. TransAlta also pays for some of its engineers and dam safety officials to be part of an ongoing multi-disciplinary research effort known as the Canadian Induced Seismicity Collaboration or CISC.

The CISC’s website notes that fracking-induced earthquakes are a “pressing problem” in Western Canada and in British Columbia and Alberta particularly. “There is a significant (though very small) possibility that triggered events could be large enough to cause significant damage,” the CISC’s scientists say.

According to Hatcher, TransAlta has secured agreement from natural gas companies operating in Alberta that they will adhere to a special “traffic light” system in a zone between five kilometres and 10 kilometres from its Brazeau dam and the shorelines of the dam’s 13-kilometre-long reservoir. “The traffic light system works in a similar manner to other traffic light systems for hydraulic fracturing, with a Green (proceed)/Yellow (pause and monitor) and Red (stop) protocol,” Hatcher said in written response to questions.

“TransAlta is concerned about the potential impact of fracking induced earthquakes and continues to work with the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER), Alberta Environment and the oil and gas operators to ensure that hydrocarbon development occurs in a safe manner that doesn’t create unnecessary risk to existing infrastructure,” Hatcher added.

In the much more sensitive zone immediately beside the dam and reservoir and extending out five kilometres, TransAlta has effectively shut down all fracking operators after filing a number of “statements of concern” with the AER, Alberta’s equivalent of the OGC.

Hatcher said that TransAlta could not release the documents and referred questions to the AER. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has filed a second Freedom of Information request to obtain copies.

Documents released by BC Hydro in response to the first FOI show that BC Hydro was prompted to call for frack-free buffer zones around its dams after learning what TransAlta had achieved in Alberta. BC Hydro’s Peace River dams are not only the biggest power sources in the province’s hydroelectric network (the Bennett dam furnishes one-quarter of the province’s hydroelectric power), but also in the region of the province with the richest natural gas reserves.

Special Consideration Given to Underground Gas Storage Reservoir

Only one other highly sensitive, yet little known, infrastructure project in B.C. is currently the subject of special operating guidelines as far as fracking is concerned.

BC Hydro learned of those guidelines in email correspondence with the OGC.

The infrastructure in question is a massive underground storage reservoir capable of holding 77 billion cubic feet of natural gas. It is near an area called Pink Mountain, where Progress Energy, a subsidiary of Petronas, is actively engaged in building roads, well pads, freshwater and wastewater holdings ponds, compressor stations, pipeline corridors and other infrastructure integral to the gas-drilling and fracking process.

The company also has plans on the books, which the provincial government has exempted from BC Utilities Commission review, to have a privately owned and operated hydro transmission built to the Pink Mountain area from the Peace River’s hydroelectric facilities. The new line would allow Progress to burn less natural gas in compressors by switching to hydroelectricity, thus increasing the profitability of its fracked gas.

The underground gas storage facility consists of two underground storage reservoirs and is about 1,400 metres below the ground. Since the late 1980s, natural gas has typically been pumped into the reservoirs in the summer months when gas demand is low and then pumped out as needed in the fall and winter months.

Fortis Inc. announced that it was purchasing the facility from Chevron in 2015 at a cost of approximately US$266 million.

At the time of its purchase, Fortis noted that the facility could become critical in the event LNG went ahead in the province. “The facility — which is the only underground gas storage facility in B.C. offering storage to third parties — is also uniquely positioned to benefit from the completion of proposed LNG export projects, where it could provide balancing services to suppliers and LNG exporters.”

In an email response to questions, David Bennett, Fortis BC’s director of communications and external relations, said that “successful meetings” were held between the company, the OGC and the provincial Ministry of Natural Gas Development. Those talks resulted in new rules that “ensure current and future drillers and well operators are aware of the facility and operate in such a manner to maintain the integrity of the underground storage reservoirs and ensure that new well production is not taken from the ACGS [Aitken Creek Gas Storage] reservoirs.”

In a follow-up phone conversation, Bennett said that Fortis had no fears that fracking into the reservoir could result in a cataclysmic event such as an explosion. The main concern, he said, is to avoid someone taking gas out of the reservoirs by fracking into them. “We don’t want anyone interfering with the reservoir,” he said, adding Fortis wants Progress Energy and any other companies engaged in fracking “to stay away from the reservoir.”

Documents released through the FOI show that the OGC has “conditions for permits” in place in proximity to the gas reservoirs. The conditions do not include an outright ban on fracking or gas drilling in a buffer area around the reservoirs. On maps supplied by the OGC, the buffer area is irregularly shaped but in most cases extends less than five kilometres out from the reservoirs.

In email correspondence, the OGC said that any company holding a permit to drill and frack for gas near the reservoirs “must not conduct any drilling completions or well operations” that have “a material adverse impact on the integrity or safe operation” of the facilities.

How this is monitored and enforced is not clear.

Natural gas companies operating in the zone are also required to notify Fortis when a well is about to be drilled and fracked. They must also notify the company when they resume drilling following “a temporary suspension” of such operations.

The special permit conditions, which BC Hydro has a copy of, do not specify what would lead to a “temporary suspension.” But earthquakes induced by fracking are among those events that have triggered stoppages in previous fracking operations.

Like the arrangements that have been worked out with BC Hydro, the special operating conditions at Aitken Creek are not common knowledge. Neither the OGC, nor the Ministry of Energy and Mines, nor the Ministry of Natural Gas Development has issued a press release stating that the special permit conditions, such as they are, are in place in the Aitken Creek area.

Much like the silence surrounding buffer zones around B.C.’s biggest hydroelectric dams, the government seems to be of the view that the less said, the better.

– Ben Parfitt is a resource policy analyst with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives – BC Office and author of Fracking Up Our Water, Hydro Power and Climate: BC’s Reckless Pursuit of Shale Gas, a research report published in 2011 that called for frack-free zones.

Image: A sign indicates underground cables at the W.A.C. Bennett Dam. Carol Linnitt/DeSmog Canada

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By Ben Parfitt for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Senior BC Hydro officials have quietly feared for years that earthquakes triggered by natural gas industry fracking operations could damage its Peace River dams, putting hundreds if not thousands of people at risk should the dams fail.

Yet the Crown corporation has said nothing publicly about its concerns, opting instead to negotiate behind the scenes with the provincial energy industry regulator, the BC Oil and Gas Commission (OGC).

To date, those discussions have resulted in only modest “understandings” between the hydro provider and the OGC that would see a halt in the issuance of any new “subsurface rights” allowing companies to drill and frack for natural gas within five kilometres of the Peace River’s two existing dams or an approved third dam on the river, the controversial $9-billion Site C project. Companies already holding such rights, however, would not be subject to the ban.

But once again, none of this is public knowledge. Only after the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives filed a Freedom of Information request with BC Hydro did the Crown corporation disclose its concerns, which focus on the possibility that fracking could trigger earthquakes more powerful than some of its dams are designed to withstand.

Documents released by the Crown corporation under the FOI show that in December 2009 senior officials at BC Hydro became alarmed at oil and gas industry operations on lands near its Peace Canyon Dam. The dam is 23 kilometres downstream from the W.A.C. Bennett Dam, a 49-year-old structure that impounds the world’s seventh-largest hydro reservoir by water volume.

Of concern was an experiment underway to extract methane gas from coal seams in proximity to the Peace River. Coal bed methane extraction had never before been tried in B.C., although it had been done extensively in several U.S. states and in Alberta with sometimes disastrous results, including instances of water so badly contaminated with gas that people could set their household tap water on fire.

To extract such gas, companies drill into relatively shallow coal seams and then pressure-pump immense amounts of water into wellbores in fracking operations. Fracking creates cracks or fractures in the coal seams that allow trapped gas to be released. Typically, companies then “de-saturate” or de-water the sites by pumping water out so the gas can flow.

At the time, Hudson’s Hope Gas, a subsidiary of Canada Energy Partners and GeoMet Inc., had drilled at least eight coal bed methane wells near the community of Hudson’s Hope, which lies about nine kilometres downstream of the Peace Canyon Dam and is home to more than 1,000 people.

The company had plans to drill and frack up to 300 more wells, with at least three of those wells situated close to the Peace Canyon Dam. The plans clearly alarmed BC Hydro’s then chief safety, health and environment officer, Ray Stewart, who called them an “immediate” threat to the region’s hydro facilities.

“The production of coal bed methane from these wells involves hydro-fracturing [fracking] to increase permeability of the coal seams, followed by extraction of groundwater to de-saturate coal seams and allow methane gas to be released,” Stewart noted in a letter to the provincial Ministry of Environment’s Glen Davidson, then British Columbia’s comptroller of water rights.

“BC Hydro believes that there are immediate and future potential risks to BC Hydro’s reservoir, dam and power generation infrastructure as a result of this.”

Stewart went on to warn that the “potential effects” of such actions could be natural gas industry-induced earthquakes that were greater in magnitude “than the original design criteria for the dam.” What risks this posed to people and communities immediately downstream of the dam, he did not say.

Stewart also warned that fracking could “reactivate” ancient faults in the region, which could potentially set the stage for earthquakes. He also warned of unspecified “hydrogeologic impacts” on hydro reservoirs from fracking and the potential for site-specific areas of land to subside or sink as a result of immense amounts of water being pumped out of the earth or in the event that de-watered coal seams somehow ignited.

There are no further such letters from Stewart in the documents supplied by BC Hydro. Part of the reason for that may be that coal bed methane extraction was a short-lived phenomenon in B.C. No company in the Peace region or anywhere else in the province for that matter is currently drilling or fracking for such gas.

However, no sooner had natural gas companies dropped their pursuit of coal bed methane than they turned to another so-called “unconventional” fossil fuel — shale gas. The Montney Basin, which underlies much of the Peace River region, is rich in shale gas. But extracting shale gas, which is tightly bound up in rock formations, requires the use of even greater brute force fracking technology. More water must be pumped at even higher pressure to fracture the rock and extract the trapped gas than is the case with coal bed methane, which is typically found closer to the earth’s surface.

Big Dams & a Big Fracking Problem in BC’s Energy-rich #PeaceRiver Region https://t.co/6JslA7kIPj @christyclarkbc @maryforbc #bcpoli #SiteC

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) August 16, 2016

As fracking for shale gas became more common, senior officials at BC Hydro began to see a pattern. Earthquakes started occurring in lockstep with fracking operations. One of the most pronounced examples occurred in the Farrell Creek fracking zone, near BC Hydro’s Peace River dams. Between July 2010 and March 2013, a dozen earthquakes were recorded in the region, ranging from a low of 1.6 magnitude on the Richter scale to a high of 3.4.

The cluster of earthquakes, all in roughly the same confined region where one company, Talisman Energy, was involved in extensive fracking operations, caught the attention of Scott Gilliss, BC Hydro’s dam safety engineer in the Peace River region.

Gilliss made his concerns known to senior officials at head office. Shortly after that, he received an email from Des Hartford, Hydro’s principal engineering scientist, who reported directly to Stephen Rigbey, the corporation’s director of dam safety.

“Scott,” Hartford’s email began: “As was discussed at the Department Meeting yesterday, this is to confirm that having brought forward your concerns about hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) activities in proximity of dams and reservoirs, you have discharged your responsibilities with respect to reporting and management of this matter. It is now up to Stephen as advised by me to determine what if any action should be taken by Dam Safety with respect to this matter.”

“Fundamentally,” Hartford’s email continued, “hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) is one of these ‘new and emergent’ threats that require examination in the context of scientific and policy considerations in order that any meaningful management actions can be initiated if required.”

Hartford instructed Gilliss to document his concerns so that others at BC Hydro could “take them forward.”

Gilliss did so, pointing out in a subsequent email released by BC Hydro that “oil and gas production may have contributed to a dam breach” at the Baldwin Hill Dam in Los Angeles in 1963.

The Baldwin Hill breach, as described by award-winning investigative reporter and writer Andrew Nikiforuk in his most recent book Slick Water: Fracking and One Insider’s Stand Against the World’s Most Powerful Industry, occurred at a then new dam, and resulted in a “colossal rupture that sent 292 million gallons of water spilling into a residential community, destroying hundreds of homes and killing five people.”

A subsequent review of the catastrophe by Richard Meehan, a leading expert on fluid migration at Stanford University, and Douglas Hamilton, a prominent civil engineer, concluded that “fluid injection” by the oil and gas industry, combined with sinking ground around the dam had led to the structure’s sudden and ultimately deadly failure.

“This is the case study that triggered my concern over hydraulic fracturing in the Peace,” Gilliss wrote in an email to Hartford on March 17, 2013. “The Baldwin hills case appeared to have occurred following very intense [oil and gas industry] exploration and development, the likes of which we don’t have here yet. The geology of their site was also quite complex and riddled with faults. A similarity does exist in that there are two small thrust faults downstream of PCN [the Peace Canyon Dam] which dip beneath the dam. Reactivation of these small faults could be problematic for PCN. There are other north south trending fault[s] in the area.”

Gilliss ended his letter on a note of exasperation.

“In my view, which I have already shared, the province should simply add buffer zones around any very Extreme and Very High Consequence Dams, where hydraulic fracturing cannot be undertaken without a prior full investigation into the risks, and an implemented risk management plan. Why is this so difficult?”

Gilliss’s buffer zone idea was by no means new. Two years earlier, after conducting research for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, I had authored a report calling for “no-go zones” where fracking was prohibited to protect other important resources such as water. By then, there were also de facto bans on fracking in Quebec and New York State.

After writing his email, Gilliss and other top BC Hydro officials had even more reason to think that no-go zones made sense. More and more earthquakes in northeast B.C. were being triggered by fracking, including a magnitude 4.6 tremor that occurred to the north of Fort St. John last year. It was in an area then being actively fracked by Progress Energy, a subsidiary of Malaysian state-owned Petronas. The strength of that induced earthquake was the largest to date anywhere in the world associated with fracking operations.

Petronas is behind a controversial proposal to build a massive Liquefied Natural Gas or LNG terminal at Lelu Island near Prince Rupert. The raw gas for the plant would come almost entirely from northeast B.C., including the Peace River area, and would have to be fracked to be produced. This fact has led some people who oppose the project to refer to it not as an LNG project but an LFG or Liquefied Fracked Gas project.

At least some of that gas would come from lands adjacent to what could one day be a new 83-kilometre-long reservoir impounded by the Site C Dam. Like the upstream Bennett Dam, Site C would be an earth-filled dam.

This image from the BC Hydro documents shows a no-frack zone surrounding the Site C dam on the Peace River.

The Bennett dam, completed in 1967, is now almost exactly halfway through its projected 100-year operating life. At nearly two kilometres across and the height of a 60-storey building, it is one of the largest earth-filled dams in North America. In 1996, it became the subject of intense engineering and safety scrutiny when two sinkholes suddenly opened at the crest of the dam.

In an investigative magazine article written a few years after that discovery, writer Anne Mullens noted that were the dam to fail, it would unleash a torrent of water so powerful that it would wipe out the Peace Canyon dam downstream, sending an “unstoppable burst of water 135 metres high,” down on the residents of Hudson’s Hope and communities much farther downstream.

“Unlike a tsunami, the destruction wouldn’t simply peak and stop,” Mullens wrote in BC Business Magazine. “The pent-up waters of Williston Lake would just keep coming, seeking to return to its natural elevation. The waters would flow for weeks, scouring away communities like Old Fort, Taylor, Peace River, Fort Smith and beyond. The onslaught would back up tributaries and inundate the entire Peace River Basin, flooding Lake Athabasca and Great Slave Lake. The floods could devastate northern Alberta, portions of Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories all the way to the Arctic Ocean. The death toll could be high; the environmental and structural damage astronomical. Combined with the loss of generating power of the dam, the unprecedented disaster would cost billions of dollars and throw B.C.’s economy into turmoil.”

Stephen Rigbey, BC Hydro’s director of dam safety, says that in the aftermath of the discovery and repair of those sinkholes the Bennett dam has become “one of the world’s most studied and instrumented dams.” There are a number of upgrades underway at the dam, including the replacement of “large rocks on the upstream face of the dam that protect the dam from wind and wave action.”

In an interview following the release of the FOI materials, Rigbey said that Gilliss and other dam safety officials operating in the field are paid to worry, but that he himself has no concerns that fracking operations would trigger any catastrophic failure at BC Hydro’s Peace River dams.

Rigbey did say, however, that ground motions from fracking operations could cause slight alterations to “weak bedrock” near the dams and that in turn could change the way that water naturally seeps through earth-filled dams. Ground motions could also potentially knock some electrical control equipment off-line, Rigbey added. In the event that one or both happened, BC Hydro would be faced with high repair and maintenance costs.

“Would it [fracking] bring the dam down? Not a hope. Would it do damage and cost me a lot of money? Absolutely. It would cost me a lot of time and a lot of money and that’s what I don’t want to occur,” Rigbey said.

Rigbey said that for these reasons BC Hydro has sought to exclude fracking from zones nearby the Bennett and Peace Canyon dams and around the construction zone of the Site C dam.

At this point in time, the unwritten “understanding” between the OGC and Hydro is that no new tenures will be awarded to companies allowing them access to natural gas deposits in a zone within five kilometres of the three dam sites. Companies already holding such rights will, however, be allowed to drill and frack for gas. In the event that happens, BC Hydro says it will work with the OGC “to effectively manage any risk.”

“This is a work in progress,” Rigbey said. “We are working toward strengthening the current understanding.”

Graham Currie, the OGC’s executive director of corporate affairs, confirmed in an email response to questions that five-kilometre buffers are in place around the two existing dams and the proposed Site C dam. He said that the buffer zone around Site C will “prevent the sale of oil and gas rights within the buffer area.”

Currie added that the proposed Site C dam falls within the Montney shale gas zone, one of the most actively drilled and fracked zones in the province.

“Site C falls within the Montney play and will be built to a high seismic safety standard,” Currie said in an email response to questions filed with the OGC. “During construction, permit conditions on a [natural gas] well in the Montney may be used to control the timing of hydraulic fracturing operations. All wells in the Montney are double-lined with cement and steel to a depth of 600 meters for further protection.”

The email fails to mention that such protective measures do not prevent fracking-induced earthquakes. Cement casings, which are often imperfectly poured and prone to fail, are intended to prevent groundwater from being contaminated — an entirely different issue.

The “understanding” between Hydro and the OGC does not extend to the lands around the reservoirs themselves, Currie said. That includes lands around what could one day be the Site C reservoir; lands that according to a document prepared for BC Hydro could experience as many as 4,000 landslides during and after the reservoir fills. Whether or not fracking could further destabilize those lands damaging the reservoir and dam itself remains unknown.

What is known, however, is that earthquakes induced by fracking behave entirely differently than do naturally-occurring earthquakes.

Gail Atkinson is a professor in Earth Sciences, a leading expert on the effects of induced earthquakes, and holds the Industrial Chair in Hazards from Induced Seismicity at the University of Western Ontario. The chair is funded, in part, by TransAlta, a privately owned hydro provider in Alberta.

In response to written questions, Atkinson said most people would agree with the proposition that “precluding oil and gas activity such as fracking…within some radius of dams and reservoirs would prevent the possibility of induced seismicity that could damage such facilities.”

Atkinson said the big concern with earthquakes triggered by events such as fracking is that they occur much closer to the earth’s surface than do natural earthquakes. A fracking-induced tremor might be as close to the surface as two kilometres, while a natural earthquake might occur 10 kilometres down. The shaking caused by a fracking-induced earthquake may be of only short duration, but it is a stronger and different kind of shaking. The potentially “strong ground motions” generated by such shaking occur “closer to infrastructure on the surface.”

“The concern is that the potential for induced earthquakes to generate strong motions makes it difficult to satisfy the high safety requirements for critical infrastructure, if earthquakes can be induced by operations in very close proximity [to dams and reservoirs],” Atkinson said.

While there is presently “no consensus” over what constitutes a reasonable size for no-frack zones, buffer zones do make sense, Atkinson said. “A zone of monitoring beyond the buffer zone is also a good precautionary measure in my view, as it would allow low-level induced seismicity from disposal or fracking beyond the buffer to be detected quickly and any necessary measures to be taken. Enhanced monitoring would also provide valuable research data to improve our understanding of the issue.”

In a telephone interview, Rigbey said he agreed with Atkinson’s thinking that both firm no-fracking buffer zones and special management zones beyond that made sense.

Atkinson’s thinking is in keeping with ongoing efforts by TransAlta to protect some of its hydro facilities in Alberta from natural gas industry fracking operations. Those efforts appear to have effectively shut down fracking in a buffer zone around one of TransAlta’s dams and the dam’s reservoir as well. Special operating guidelines are also in place beyond the buffer zones that can force companies to cease fracking.

But, as is the case in B.C., negotiations between TransAlta and Alberta’s energy industry regulator have happened behind closed doors.

Members of the public who are at direct risk should a catastrophic dam failure occur are kept in the dark when it comes to negotiations that could have a direct impact on their lives.

Tomorrow: Alberta’s advances and questions about why B.C. may be lagging behind.

Ben Parfitt is a resource policy analyst with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives – BC Office and author of Fracking Up Our Water, Hydro Power and Climate: BC’s Reckless Pursuit of Shale Gas, a research report published in 2011 that called for frack-free zones.

BC Hydro Fracking Radius Images Select FOI

BC Hydro Fracking Radius Select FOI Materials

Image: Fracking operations in Northeast B.C. Photo: Damien Gillis/Commonsense Canadian

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This article is authored by Binnu Jeyakumar and originally appeared on the Pembina Institute's blog.

“The days of denial are over,” said Environment Minister Shannon Phillips, kicking off the 2015 Alberta Climate Summit held last week in Edmonton. She was sending a message that Alberta’s attitude and commitments around climate change are changing.

The summit focused on exploring viable options for progress on climate change, with the participation of stakeholders from across the spectrum. More than 300 people filled the room, representing the oil and gas industry, the electricity sector, First Nations, unions, environmental groups, municipalities and the provincial government. The excitement was palpable as participants discussed both the reasons to take action and the opportunities now available.

The summit explored policy solutions in several areas, including carbon pricing, renewable electricity and energy efficiency. If you want more context on climate policy in Alberta, Pembina’s backgrounder from August is worth a look.

Carbon pricing

The morning included a discussion of British Columbia’s $30-per-tonne carbon tax, and the need for better communications about the success of carbon pricing. The panel emphasized the need for a better-informed conversation about what emissions sources could be covered and exempted, the effective price level, and the different ways to use the revenue that is generated.

On the topic of effective pricing, Nicholas Rivers of the University of Ottawa pointed to various studies that link price and impact, saying “We are looking at a $100-ish price on carbon by 2050.”

Of course, carbon emissions are not just carbon dioxide. Drew Nelson, of the Environmental Defense Fund, reminded attendees of the climate impact of methane emissions from the oil and gas sector. The United States has introduced cost-effective regulations that reduce methane leaks in the oil and gas sector, and enacting similar regulations in Alberta could result in significant reductions in emissions which total to well over 10 million tonnes of carbon emissions.

Coal phase-out and renewables

“What is our electricity system designed for?” was the question posed by Robert Hornung, president of the Canadian Wind Energy Association. He argued that to make sustainable reductions to carbon emissions, the entire electricity system — rather than just a few components — has to be reviewed. Alberta needs to evaluate the best ways to incentivize capital investment in renewables, learning from the experiences of other jurisdictions such as Ontario. Some options to consider include centralized procurement of electricity, or making retailers responsible for achieving a certain proportion of renewables in the generation mix.

There is also a need to manage the climate impacts, as well as the local environmental and health impacts, of Alberta’s existing coal-fired plants. The closure of TransAlta’s coal plant in Centralia, Washington, was discussed as a case study for how Alberta could negotiate an accelerated phase-out of coal.

Energy efficiency

When talking about cutting emissions, there’s a compelling case for energy efficiency. It’s the cheapest way to make more energy available, it creates jobs, it reduces operating expenses and it cuts down fossil fuel use. As Alberta adopts a new building code, the province should look to B.C. and Ontario — two provinces that are making huge strides in promoting building efficiency and sustainable urban development — for ideas on how to save energy.

There was no shortage of energy in the summit room, with people staying long after the end of the event to continue their discussions. That enthusiasm was perhaps driven by a sense of urgency, as the economic, health and environmental risks associated with the status quo become more and more evident. But it also speaks to a distinct sense of excitement in the province about the tangible actions that Alberta can and should take in the near future.

Presentations from the 2015 Alberta Climate Summit are available online here.

There are also a number of ways to get involved:

• Take the Alberta government’s climate change survey (open until September 18)
• Send your recommendations to the Climate Leadership Panel
• Stay tuned to the activities of the Energy Futures Lab, a platform to discuss, experiment and innovate in Alberta’s energy system.

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Earlier this week, TransAlta — the massive, publicly traded electricity generation company based in Calgary — was found culpable by the Alberta Utilities Commission (AUC) of repeatedly manipulating prices in 2010 and 2011 by intentionally shutting down power plants during peak demand to boost costs for consumers.

The Market Surveillance Administrator estimates the actions — which boosted costs by between 10 and 60 per cent depending on occurrence — made the company $16 million.

TransAlta has denied all claims and floated the idea of taking the case to the Alberta Court of Appeals.

Such a situation once again raises questions about the appropriateness of a deregulated electricity market, a feature Alberta has uniquely sported since 2001.

Some new companies have entered the game since, dividing the market share pie into smaller chunks.

But we’re still talking major players here. In 2014, TransAlta pulled in $2.4 billion in revenue, ENMAX made $3.3 billion and ATCO earned $4.5 billion — which is why, in addition to re-examining regulation (which could help solve the price spikes and blackouts the province has faced for years), some are calling for a decentralized market powered by smaller, closer sources.

“Decentralized energy is bringing energy closer to where it’s needed,” says Moustafa Youssef, owner and installer for Solar Hero. “In a way, you’re transferring the generators from larger corporations to homeowners or building owners. You’re relying less on generators, and their transmission and distribution systems.”

The Case for Decentralizing and Diversifying

Environmental groups have been pushing for this for years: in 2009, the Pembina Institute encouraged the situating of generation far closer to demand, while a 2010 Canadian Solar Industries Association report made the case that decentralization minimizes the likelihood of a large, central facility going down, as well as creating jobs and investment opportunities.

It could also prevent companies from doing what TransAlta did — by generating electricity on your own rooftop (with occasional supplements from your immediate neighbours and the larger grid), individuals can exercise a bit more control.

Unfortunately, Alberta hasn’t done much to promote such a transition.

Microgenerated power — electricity generated from a small site, such as one’s home — is essentially subsidizing the grid. Many solar advocates argue that producers don’t receive fair compensation as solar generates electricity during the daytime (when power is most expensive) but only receives remuneration based on an average monthly price.

The same is happening with wind power: the windiest hours produce the most energy but also result in the cheapest wholesale costs.

“It’s great that it’s driving prices down with renewable means,” Youssef says. “But it is also frightening investors without any secure, long-term guarantees.”

Leaving TransAlta and Co. Behind

The Alberta NDP have alluded to re-evaluating the deregulated market.

If the government does proceed on that front, it could lead to stable pricing for renewables and potential investments in smarter grid technologies that promote decentralized power.

Southern Alberta features some of the best geography in Canada for solar, wind power and cogeneration.

The rapid replacement of coal with natural gas means it will be easier to integrate energy sources, Youssef says, as gas turbine plants are simpler to throttle to follow load capacities than coal. The time seems ideal to take advantage of such factors.

At this point, the Alberta Utilities Commission hasn’t determined penalties for TransAlta’s actions. However, the body can fine the company up to $1 million for each of the 11 days the offence occurred on, as well as taking back the benefits from the infraction.

Company share values plummeted following the verdict. However, the company is expected to have enough liquid assets to cover fines without dividends being affected.

TransAlta was also busted in 2011 for blocking electricity imports from other jurisdictions to boost prices, costing the company $370,000 in fines.

Image Credit: BASF via Flickr

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Woodfibre LNG in Squamish has announced it will run its proposed liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant off electricity from the B.C. grid, rather than using natural gas  — making it the province’s first LNG producer to commit to do so.

Using electricity to power its cooling compressors will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 80 per cent and decrease local air pollution, according to the company.   “We sought input from the community at an early stage and ‘air quality’ was a top concern,” said Byng Giraud, vice president of corporate affairs for Woodfibre LNG. “Our engineers have now confirmed that going electric is indeed feasible, so the choice is a clear one.”

Woodfibre is a small-scale project about one-tenth of the size of the large projects proposed on B.C.’s north coast.

“It’s setting a great standard for the others to follow,” said Merran Smith, executive director of Clean Energy Canada. “If B.C. is going to develop an LNG industry then the carbon footprint of the industry has got to be as small as possible.”

Liquefying natural gas involves cooling gas to -162 degrees Celsius, at which point it turns into a liquid and shrinks in volume by 600 times, making it possible to transport on ships. However, this process takes enormous amounts of electricity.

Power company TransAlta estimates electricity demand from LNG facilities in B.C. could total 4,000 MW by 2018 — that’s about four times the power that would be produced by BC Hydro’s proposed Site C dam on the Peace River.

"Cleanest LNG in the world:" What does it mean?

In 2012, Premier Christy Clark told a World Economic Forum in China that B.C. has “set a goal to have the cleanest LNG in the world. We want our LNG plants to be principally fueled by renewables."

Rich Coleman, the minister responsible for LNG development, also said in 2012: “We’re trying to stay away as much as possible from having to use gas for power.”

This week, Coleman changed his tune, telling the Globe and Mail: “The cleanest means to me that we will beat any other gas-fired plant in the world.”

“That is Rich Coleman lowering the bar from what Premier Christy Clark and in fact Rich Coleman has said in the past,” Smith said.

She noted that if three of the larger LNG plants up north were to commit to using renewable energy instead of gas, it would reduce carbon pollution by the equivalent of taking three million cars off the road each year.

LNG can be powered by renewables: new study

Clean Energy Canada has argued that B.C. could create 400 more permanent regional jobs (a 45 per cent increase) and cut carbon pollution by a third without undermining competitiveness if it required LNG producers to primarily power their facilities with renewable energy instead of fossil fuels.

Coleman dismissed that idea this week, saying: “The cost to deliver the power [to a large LNG plant] would be so expensive that it would be ridiculous to make the investment.”

Clean Energy Canada disagrees. The group recently commissioned a feasibility study by Navius Research, a consulting company that has worked with the B.C. government, and Steve Davis & Associates, a firm providing British Columbia power developers with advice.

The study found that any LNG facility on B.C.’s North Coast could reliably power its production facilities with renewable energy — affordably and on schedule using established commercial technologies.

The study, to be released next week, also found powering an LNG plant via renewables would reduce carbon pollution by 45 per cent and increase local permanent jobs by 40 per cent.

“What we have modeled is using new renewables from the north coast,” Smith said. “It’s economically feasible and technically feasible. It will add a two per cent cost to the sale of gas, which in the world of gas is negligible."

A poll conducted by NRG Research Group in October 2013 found 91 per cent of British Columbians polled stated it was either “very important” or “somewhat important” that proposed LNG plants maximize their use of renewable energy.

Next week, 1,200 delegates from around the world will be in B.C. for the province’s second annual International LNG in B.C. conference. There are 14 LNG projects proposed for B.C., although only a handful are expected to be built.

Photo: Rich Coleman at revenue-sharing agreements announcement between the province and First Nations by Province of British Columbia

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This is the second installment of a two-part series on carbon capture and storage. Read Part 1, Alberta's Carbon Capture and Storage Plan Stagnate as Carbon Price Lags.

As Alberta falls behind on its goal to capture 30 million tonnes of carbon emissions a year by 2020, hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies are being pumped into the carbon capture and storage (CCS) sector.

Enhance Energy’s Alberta Carbon Trunk Line project is receiving $495 million from Alberta and $63.3 million from Ottawa. Enhance says on its website the project would have been much smaller without the government investment.

Shell Canada, with partners Chevron Canada Ltd. and Marathon Oil Corp., is developing Alberta’s only other CCS project, called Quest, with $120 million in federal and $745 million in provincial support. Shell aims to sequester more than one million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year from its Scotford upgrader, starting in late 2015.

Shell told Postmedia it paid $400 million in taxes and royalties in 2012 and the project is requiring the company to share its expertise with other companies.

As part of the agreement for funding Alberta’s two CCS projects, the knowledge gained from developing the projects is being shared with the CCS community at large, says Mike Fernandez, executive director of sustainable energy at Alberta Energy.[view:in_this_series=block_1]

In Saskatchewan, SaskPower hoped to start its $1.3-billion CCS project to capture one million tonnes of carbon dioxide by April 2014, said Tyler Hopson, a SaskPower spokesperson. Although recent delays have postponed the project coming on line.

With $240 million from the federal government and the rest of start-up funding coming from SaskPower, the Crown corporation will use the carbon dioxide from its coal-fired plant at Boundary Bay for enhanced oil recovery operations. SaskPower is also building a $60-million facility to provide firms with space to test their capture technologies.

Even with major government support, projects are not guaranteed.

Cancelled CCS projects

TransAlta Corp. announced in 2012 it was abandoning its CCS project connected to its new Keephills 3 coal-fired plant. Despite $342 million from Ottawa and $436 million in funding from Alberta, TransAlta cancelled the project because “the market for CO2 sales and the value of emissions reductions in Alberta and Canada are not sufficient,” according to the project’s final report.

The project would have accounted for about 20 per cent of Alberta’s total carbon dioxide emissions reduction target by 2015. Instead, the company decided to pay the $15-per-tonne penalty for carbon over a certain level.

“What’s really needed, of course, is a regulatory framework on CO2 that puts a value on that CO2. A significant value,” Don Wharton, vice-president of policy and sustainability at TransAlta, told the Globe and Mail.

 “The federal government came out with coal regulations that basically allow all their [TransAlta’s] plants to continue to emit at their current level until the end of their economic life,” Severson-Baker says. “In the meantime, the Alberta government hasn’t followed through with its plan to increase the amount of money it charges on a per-tonne basis for large emitters and it has remained at $15-a-tonne for the last five years.”

With no stronger carbon regulations in sight, fossil fuel companies drop projects to reduce or sequester carbon.

The other cancellation occurred in early 2013. Swan Hills Synfuels deferred building its Synfuels LP gas plant to turn underground coal into synthetic natural gas because of low natural gas prices. As a result, Alberta backed away from providing $285 million in subsidies to help build the carbon capture technology.

“CCS investment is the same as a refinery or power plant, it is a very capital-intensive investment where you need that guaranteed revenue stream over time, so it is not just a question of what the carbon price is today, it’s, ‘Can I lock in that carbon price over the long-term?’ ” said Andrew Leach, energy economist from the University of Alberta.

No GHG Regulations and No New Funding Plans

In a year-end interview, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said federal greenhouse gas regulations for the oil and gas industry are delayed again. Harper said the regulations would have to wait until they can be harmonized with the United States.

With weak coal regulations and no new oil and gas regulations to boost the cost of pumping unabated atmosphere-heating gases, there are also no new funding plans for new CCS projects coming down the pipeline in Alberta.

“There are no plans; no new funding plans for a big CCS funding program,” Fernandez at Alberta Energy said.

A carbon tax would allow companies to make their own decisions, Severson-Baker says, whereas direct funding for CCS puts government in the role of choosing technologies.

Alberta Would Need 25 Quest Projects

According to Alberta’s 2009 climate plan, the province aims to capture 30 million tonnes of carbon emissions annually by 2020. If all goes well, Shell Canada’s Quest and Enhance Energy’s Alberta Carbon Trunk Line will only be sequestering roughly three to four million tonnes by 2020.

In 2012, Simon Dyer, policy director at the Pembina Institute, did the math for the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce:

Alberta’s climate plan states that 30 MT of annual reductions will be derived by CCS by 2020 — the equivalent of building 25 Quest-type projects in the next 8 years. Clearly, this is a fiction.

When Alberta projects to 2050, the province aims to capture and store 139 million tonnes of emissions.

“When I look out to 2050, yes we acknowledge it is an aggressive target and we are going to need to see commercial CCS at dozens of sites, possibly at a hundred sites,” Fernandez said. “I am pretty confident as the price of carbon starts to rise in North America, the cost of this technology will come down and it is very realistic to hit our 2050 CCS targets.”

In mid-December, a Vancouver-area start-up Inventys Thermal Technologies announced former U.S. energy secretary Steven Chu was joining its board. In the announcement, Inventys’ president said its new technology could cut capital and operating expenses to less than a fifth of current processes, reported the Globe and Mail.

As the CCS technology matures, the cost to sequester will drop, but the speed and decrease needed to make CCS a commercial solution can only be achieved via a price on carbon, Severson-Baker says. 

Will the carbon stay put underground?

If the technology became practical and Alberta was somehow sequestering 139 million tonnes of emissions per year by 2050, research has shed light on concerns this could cause earthquakes and ultimately release the trapped carbon dioxide.

A 2012 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Mark Zoback and Steven Gorelick of Stanford University reveal there is a “high probability” injecting large amounts of carbon dioxide into brittle rocks will trigger earthquakes and even small quakes could break the seal of the carbon repository.

The authors concluded, “large-scale CCS is a risky, and likely unsuccessful, strategy for significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

With the carbon needing to be stored underground forever, will the oil companies of today be around in a hundred years to monitor their oceans of carbon dioxide sitting under the surface?

Read part 1, here.

Image Credit: Pembina Institute via Flickr

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By focusing on fossil fuels, Canada is missing a tremendous opportunity to capitalize on clean energy technology, according to a new report from the Pembina Institute.

Through both a review of recent literature and one-on-one interviews with 21 of the country’s “clean energy leaders,” the report, entitled Competing in Clean Energy: Capitalizing on Canadian innovation in a $3 trillion economy, exposes the financial cost of the federal government’s overwhelming emphasis on the short-term profits provided by oil, gas and shale.

Interviewees include Nick Parker of Cleantech Group, who admits he finds it “difficult to not be acerbic or negative when it comes to how Canada ranks in the clean energy race.”

What are we missing?

As world leaders move to make the changes necessary to comply with the Copenhagen Accord which aims to limit global temperature rises to two degrees Celsius, they are increasingly looking for options to cut down on carbon emissions and move to renewable energy sources.

“Yet much of the focus of leaders in government and business has been on Canada’s abundance of raw fossil fuel commodities — from oilsands to shale gas and coal — and the opportunity to generate prosperity by exporting these resources.”

Thus far, the Canadian government has favoured a “go slow” approach to energy innovation, “betting on a slower emergence of a low-carbon economy, and a reluctance to impose additional costs on domestic industries and consumers to address a global problem [climate change].”

This has left us behind in the lucrative field of energy innovation. Although Canada is one of the top research and energy development funders in the world, our rate of funding as a percentage of GDP is presently less that the peak in 1984. Furthermore, poor coordination and short-sited funding have left us in fifth place in terms of clean energy inventions behind Korea, Germany, Japan and the United States. 

The report shows that aiding in the global transition toward clean energy is not only a moral imperative, but also a potential windfall for Canadian businesses, as well as an excellent way to create new jobs for Canadian workers. 

“With more than 700 companies, the cleantech sector has emerged as a major driver of innovation and employment growth in Canada, investing almost $2 billion in research and development and seeing an 11 per cent increase in employment between 2008 and 2010. Yet Canada currently captures just one per cent of the $1 trillion global clean technology industry. It is estimated that, as this industry grows to a projected $3 trillion by 2020, Canadian clean technology companies have the potential to increase their market share from today’s $9 billion to $60 billion.”

What can we do?

The report outlines three opportunities for the Canadian government to encourage growth in the clean energy entrepreneurship:

• Improve access to capital to keep emerging companies from falling into financial “valleys of death” before they are able to bring their new technologies to market. Chief Environment Officer of TD Bank Karen Clarke-Whistler provides advice on what the government could do to make banks more “comfortable” with supplying much needed financial resources to clean energy companies which tend to be high risk and have high capital needs.

• Create a national energy strategy that would focus hitherto poorly distributed funds. Many interviewees, including Tom Heintzman, co-founder and CEO of Bullfrog Power, suggest using fossil fuel resources to fund clean energy research, thus aiding in the smooth transition to sustainable technology.

• End preferential tax treatment for fossil fuel production and begin to figure the real cost of greenhouse gas pollution into the price of carbon-based energy. Dawn Farrell, CEO of TransAlta, encourages us to see the atmosphere that takes up CO2 emissions as a scarce resource and then price that resource to encourage more efficient use.

It concludes that if the federal government can go the way of some provincial governments and shift its focus away from the development and sale of fossil fuels, this country is, “well positioned to compete in the field of clean energy technology, creating jobs and economic prosperity across the country.”

Image Credit: Green Energy Futures on flickr.

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