Pipeline News North

Northern British Columbia and Alberta's Oil and Gas Industry Vol. 1 Issue 2 • dist: 20,275

february 25 • 2011

h t r No

• Free

in this issue: • oil & gas - driving northern economic development • Gwyn morgan - a road to the order of canada • going modular - all the comforts of home

Industrial Instrumentation Mechanic students at Northern Lights College gain practical experience in their classrooms in the college’s Industry Training Centre. The facility was built with the help of contributions from oil and gas companies that operate in the region. (Photo courtesy of Northern Lights College)

www.inland-group-fsj.com

2 • PIPELINE NEWS NORTH I February 2011 special features 8

20

23

Gwyn Morgan - a road to the Order of Canada Caribou, caribou: Part 1 - what is creating the problem?

Caribou, caribou: Part 2 - what is industry doing to help?

opinion 2 Columnist: Don Thompson

community 4 5 18

A golden moment Talisman donation Making it good - Horn River Basin Producers group

industry news 3 Oil & Gas - driving

economic development 6 Northern Gateway - a little

bump in the road 6

opinion Earning and maintaining our social licence

I am proud to say that Pipeline News North has invited me to share my views as the President of the Oil Sands Developers Group (OSDG), so for the next while, please tune in to my monthly column for perspectives on the oil sands development taking place in Alberta’s northern region. As well, I will be presenting the facts that I believe many Albertans aren’t hearing from the media or environmental groups. I look forward to hearing from you with any questions or comments.

The OSDG is coming up on the third anniversary of its new name and thirteenth anniversary since it started addressing the high-growth challenges in Fort McMurray and the Wood Buffalo region.

Guest Column don thompson Oil Sands Development Group (OSDG)

A frac database for Western Canada

environmental 11 Noel Project - minimizing

the carbon footprint

careers & training 12 Keeping it local - trades

training at NLC

technology 25 Catching fugitives infrared provides new sight

into leaks 27 At your fingertips - COSSD

now on Smartphones

When the organization, formerly known as the Athabasca Regional Issues Working Group, began in 1997, oil sands development offered great promise. I am proud to say that after four new members joined in 2010, our membership more than quadrupled and now includes 26 oil sands development companies that work together to identify and help find solutions to regional issues from an industry perspective. Oil sands production has also nearly tripled in that time!

In my role as President of OSDG, I hear much talk about the oil sands becoming a primary resource to meet the world’s energy needs. However, this could never come about if we had faltered in our ability to work with local communities and resolve the difficult issues that arise from swift and massive resource development.

From my perspective, the work that the OSDG does is just as important to the success of the oil sands as the new technologies that are helping advance the industry.

Our employees and committees work on-the-ground to resolve issues and consult with the community to earn and maintain the industry’s social licence to operate.

Since its inception, the OSDG has acted as the industry voice on regional issues such as housing, transportation, environment, taxation, Aboriginal consultation and health care. We collect and share accurate and credible industry information, analysis and forecasts for

stakeholders.

One example that sticks in my mind is the transportation issue. Fort McMurray was becoming renowned for its transportation headaches which were a result of more than eight per cent annual population growth over the past several years.

It was clear then that the existing two-lane highway north from Fort McMurray was inadequate to accommodate thousands of bus and truck loads going to and from operations sites every day, along with roughly 15,000 employees who commute to those sites.

On top of that there are thousands of oversize loads that can slow traffic to a crawl.

To the south, the concern was not only the condition and capacity of both Highways 63 and 881 but the ability to handle the high-loads associated with transportation of modules from the Edmonton region.

Concerns included real world issues such as power shutdowns because the loads wouldn’t fit under utility lines and long lines of traffic behind these modules because of a lack of pull-off areas wide enough for them to park within.

To deal with this impending gridlock, many years ago the OSDG formed a Transportation Committee and provided transportation authorities in the Province and the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo detailed information on current highway usage and forecasted growth.

The result has been a multi-year twinning plan for Highway 63. This plan identified priority areas north and south of Fort McMurray to the plant site areas, and these priority areas are already completed.

The Committee also got together with communities along the high-load corridor from the module assembly yards near Edmonton and funded the burying or lifting of 160 power lines to prevent future power shut-downs.

Numerous pull-off areas were constructed at locations identified in consultation with transportation contractors.

Current areas of transportation focus include the need for improved transportation for the In-Situ industry south of Fort McMurray.

As you can see with this one example, the OSDG’s model of collaboration between members allows it to share detailed data with the municipality and the province to help with infrastructure planning. The annual survey, in which all of our members participate, assists in the process. This spirit of inter-company collaboration to benefit the greater community is something for which I believe the industry and all Albertans can be very proud.

And one final note on the OSDG… In keeping with our focus on providing factual, current information about the oil sands, the oil sands project list has been updated. The project list allows access to oil sands project information and the status of each project taking place in the Athabasca oil sands region.

To learn more about the Oil Sands Developers Group and about responsible oil sands development, visit www.oilsandsdevelopers.ca or read my blog at www. settingtherecordstraight.ca.

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profiles 10 FSJ’s landman - knowing

the people is the key 14 Going modular - all the

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industry news

February 2011 I pipeline news north •

3

oil & gas

- driving northern economic development james waterman Pipeline News North

A report released by the Conference Board of Canada this past December is shining a light on the significant role of the oil and gas industry in the economic development of northeastern British Columbia.

The study, conducted through the Conference Board’s Centre for the North, determined that the economic development potential for the territories and the northern sections of the seven provinces that border the territories – as defined by the individual provinces’ own classification of north and south – is driven by the natural resource sector. Obviously, the prominent natural resource in northeastern B.C. right now is the shale and tight gas deposits in the Montney formation, the Horn River Basin, and the Liard Basin. The development of those resources is certainly the big player in the economic future of the region.

Len Coad, Director of Environment, Energy and Technology Policy with the Conference Board, explained that they approached the study assuming an “unconstrained future” and then identified the opportunities and the barriers to economic growth. Industries were divided into three main categories: industries that drive economic activity; industries that enable economic activity; and so-called “opportunistic industries.”

“The driving industries are industries like mining, forestry, agriculture in the provinces, although not so much in the territories, and fishing,” said Coad. “So, those are industries that are resourcebased – you know, resource extractionbased, most of them. A mine or an oil and gas project, if the resource is of an appropriate quantity and quality, those industries can make things happen.

They can build the power generation they need. They can establish communities or establish infrastructure that isn’t in the community and can push economic development forward on their own merit.

And, of course, the ability to do that is constrained by the resource quality and quantity. And then you have industries

like electric utilities, water utilities, government services, where those industries enable development of the driving industries, but they don’t create the development themselves.”

“We had a third category – and we only really looked at one industry in that third category – and we called those the opportunistic industries, ones where once the appropriate infrastructure’s in place and the community support is there, you probably can see opportunities and build them. And tourism was the one industry that we put in that category.”

The North Peace Economic Development Commission (NPEDC) is demonstrating that continued prosperity exists in a kind of harmony between those three industry categories, but the energy sector is definitely the predominant factor.

“The North Peace’s economic priority is the energy sector,” said Dan Davies, Chair of the NPEDC. “Energy includes oil and gas, hydro, coal, biomass, wind power and solar power. You just have to look at the oil and gas lease investment – billions of dollars – over the last couple of years to know that this is the driver not only for the region, but as well as for the province.”

B.C. Minister of Energy Steve Thompson concurs with Davies’ assessment, noting that over fifty per cent of the province’s total revenue in 2010 was generated by the resource sector, emphasizing its importance to the region and the province as a whole.

“There was an earlier study from the Energy Research Institute which concluded that over seventy per cent of the northeast’s GDP depends directly or indirectly on oil and gas activity,” said Thompson. “And I don’t expect that number has changed at all in terms of being a very, very significant percentage of gross domestic product in that region.”

Indeed, the Community Development and Planning department of the Northern Rockies Regional Municipality headquartered in Fort Nelson is currently in the process of developing a new economic development strategy that reflects the growing importance of oil and gas. The existing strategy, which was drafted in 1999, is heavily focused on forestry.

That industry is essentially absent from Fort Nelson at this point, the only remaining operations being small family-owned

businesses concentrating on salvage logging and timber from oil and gas operations.

The difficulty for Fort Nelson is going to be keeping pace with the growth that is projected to occur over the next ten years. The current population is approximately 6000 people, but that number is expected to grow to 15,000 people by 2020, spurring a demand for upgrades to water, sewer and road systems, as well as a need for new residential construction for which the community presently lacks the necessary skilled labour.

“In the northern area,” said Thompson, discussing communities in the North that are expected to grow along with development of the resources, “we’re at the beginning of the development of that huge opportunity, particularly in the shale gas development and the new technology that industry’s now moving forward on in those areas, in the Horn and the Montney and those areas. So, I think we’re going to see the North continue to grow, continue to be a critical contributor to the provincial economy. It’s going to mean increased employment, increased activity, and so

part of the challenge and the opportunity is to work with the communities to make sure we can have those communities grow in a planned way, to make sure we have that good balance of activity and maintaining our strong environmental standards. So, this is a very, very exciting time for the northern area.

And I think [it] has tremendous potential when you look at the level of investment that companies are making and planning for. It’s going to be an exciting time for the northern region.”

“Obviously,” he continued, “as this growth develops, the access to skilled labour, development of those trades, is going to be a key part of it. This will be about continuing to work with communities and with local governments and with industry to look at those needs, planning for them as the industry grows. So, again, [we] recognize that is a key issue that will need to be addressed. And we are committed to continuing to work with industry and the region to do that.”

However, current low gas prices are reason to be cautious about those growth projections. continued pg 16 28231

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4 • PIPELINE NEWS NORTH I February 2011

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community a golden moment for young curlers

William Julian Regional Manager 250-785-5631 wjulian@ pipelinenewsnorth.ca

Wendy Webb Managing Editor 250-785-5631 editor@ pipelinenewsnorth.ca The junior curlers, their coaches and Joe Braun, manager of Northern Vac Services, happily pose with a broom used by the Kevin Martin rink during the gold medal game at the 2010 Olympics, which was donated by Art Desfosses of Northern

James Waterman Reporter 250-785-5631 cell:250-263-1878 jwaterman@ pipelinenewsnorth.ca

Dan Przybylski Sales 250-782-4888 ext 101 cell: 250-784-4319 dcsales@ pipelinenewsnorth.ca

Ryan Wallace Sales 250-785-5631 cell:250-261-1143 rw.fsjsales@ pipelinenewsnorth.ca

Tom Kirschner Sales 250-785-5631 cell:250-785-3522

Vac to the Fort St. John Curling Club.

Kelly Lapointe Staff Writer

A golden piece of Olympic history is now sitting in the Fort St. John Curling Club.

One of the brooms used by Canada’s Kevin Martin rink during their gold medal game last February was donated to the club this month.

Art Desfosses bought the signed broom for $8,800 at the Fort St. John Petroleum Association’s Oilmen’s Bonspiel this November. The entire Martin rink – skip Kevin Martin, third John Morris, second Marc Kennedy and lead Ben Hebert – donated items to be auctioned off to support junior curling in Fort St. John.

The junior curlers stood in awe of a broom that won a gold medal.

“I still get goose bumps when I think about it,” said junior curling coach Raymond Clerk.

“This is like the holy grail of curl-

photo by kelly lapointe

ing, it’s a broom that won a gold medal. It’s unreal, to have a sponsor like Northern Vac who actually purchased the broom and got it cased and framed and brought it back to the curling club, it means that our community is truly, deeply involved in the amateur sports here and you can’t thank those people enough.”

The auction, which auctioned off each curler to sit with a table of people, a signed jersey and the broom, raised $19,600, which is destined for the junior curling program.

Oilmen’s Bonspiel organizer Ed Pimm said the Martin rink deserves a lot of credit for its donations.

Clerk said the money will be used to get proper supplies for the kids and to train more coaches.

Curling was brought in as an option into the Grade 7 curriculum in School District 60 this year and the junior curling program grew to 30 curlers from 10 the previous season.

Clerk said it’s not far-fetched to think there could be 50-60 kids in next

year’s after school program.

Oilmen’s Bonspiel organizer Ed Pimm said it’s important for the Petroleum Association to give back to the community.

“The Oilmen’s Association I think people have a misconception that it’s all a bunch of people spending Oilmen’s money on themselves, having a party. We want to give back to the community, we’re all communityminded people,” he said.

Desfosses said the Kevin Martin rink is very down to earth and easy to get along with. At the auction, they told stories from the Olympic e xperiences.

“It was an amazing feeling. I wish I could hold onto that feeling for a long, long time,” he said.

“They’re very, very supportive of the small community and the sport.

They don’t put the light on the big centres, they put the light on the sports in the small communities and the people and that’s what I really admire.”

showing ‘em how it’s done

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February 2011 I pipeline news north •

5

Talisman donates $60,000 to School District 60 james waterman Pipeline News North Talisman Energy presented a donation of $60,000 to School District 60 during Hudson’s Hope Winter Carnival festivities at the SD 60 Cameron Lake Outdoor Education Centre on Saturday, February 5. The site has been in operation since 1984 and many of the old facilities are in need of repair. This donation from Talisman will cover most of the cost of building a new girls dormitory at the site.

“This facility is very important to our school district and our community,” said Derrek Beam, principal of Hudson’s Hope School. “And it provides so many things that are important for our kids and for our families, and the opportunities for them to be able to do the real-life, hands on learning.”

Beam noted that it is not always easy to secure funding for the sort of upgrades that the Centre requires and so he is very excited about the support School District 60 has received from Talisman in terms of improving the facility.

“There’s a real rich variety of experiences for the kids,” Beam continued, describing the value of the site.

“There’s the pond study where our students can take water samples and look at different – you know, what types of different things are living in the ecosystem.

There’s tree identification. There’s orienteering. And then there’s sort of the physical aspect where they can go on hikes, they can do challenge games, they can use the bouldering wall, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, and, of course, canoeing. We have a strong canoeing program where students can receive certification.”

The outdoor recreation element of the Centre’s programs are just as important as the educational components considering the spotlight that is now being shone on childhood obesity.

“They’ve put in some guidelines trying to improve the amount of activity that students get each week,” said Beam, describing Ministry of Education initiatives to address the issue of children’s health. “And opportunities like this one, to be able to do something that you might not be exposed to otherwise … that might open up something for those kids that they’re going to do for the rest of their lives, whether it’s cross-country skiing, hiking, snowshoeing. Or just the love of nature. You can’t always get that inside a brick and mortar building.”

According to Beam, the experience the students are

able to enjoy at the Centre can also help them become better citizens.

“A lot of it is based around the idea of cooperation and working as a team,” he explained. “The opportunity for them just to stay out here, to come somewhere and stay over night, and have that different kind of experience with their peers as well, is really quite important.”

Beam feels that this contribution from Talisman helps to reinforce those ideals of cooperation and working together. continued pg 27

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6 • PIPELINE NEWS NORTH I February 2011

industry news northern gateway - a little bump on the road james waterman Pipeline News North

The proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway Project that would see a pair of pipelines stretching from Bruderheim, Alberta to Kitimat, British Columbia ran into another hurdle.

However, according to a spokesperson from Enbridge, it appears that the hurdle is small and simply not insurmountable.

The January 19th announcement was made by the Joint Panel Review (JRP), consisting of representatives from the National Energy Board (NEB) and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEEA).

“The JRP has requested additional detail from Northern Gateway on the design and risk assessment of the pipelines due to the geotechnical aspects and the geographic location of the pipelines,” said Enbridge spokesperson Gina Jordan in a statement.

“We are assembling information on how the risk factors from the geotechnical and geographical aspects of the applied-for corridor and terminal will be taken into account and integrated with the environmental and socio-economic consequences from potential hydrocarbon releases.”

The recent JRP decision is the product of public sessions held in Whitecourt, Alberta and Kitimat and Prince George, B.C. to discuss information that Enbridge may still need to provide in order to be granted approval to complete the project. Enbridge has no issue with providing the requested information and intends to do so by the end of the first quarter of 2011.

It is just another sign of their commitment to a project that Enbridge insists will mean substantial economic benefits for the western provinces and all of Canada.

“Overall, for the project,” Jordan explained during an interview on the very day of the recent JRP announcement, “there will be 62,700 person-years … of construction throughout the Canadian economy. Peak workforce is going to be about 3000 workers. In terms of longterm jobs, there [are] 1150 long-term jobs expected.”

Jordan also mentioned economic numbers specific to B.C. that can be found in greater detail on one of the numerous fact sheets available on the Enbridge Northern Gateway website. One stat that would certainly be of interest to B.C. residents is that the four and a half years of pipeline construction in the province will cost nearly $4 billion, representing seventy-two per cent of the total cost of the project, and create over 35,000 person-years of employment. That includes approximately 4100 person-years of employment on the construction

sites and almost 11,000 person-years of employment in related industries.

“The direct employment in B.C. will provide $7.7 million in wages and benefits.” Jordan added.

Labour income in B.C. during construction is expected to be in the neighourhood of $2.5 billion, while the provincial government should gain about $165 million in tax revenue over the same period. The peak period for construction activity should be 2015 and 2016.

“And there would be over 400 workers required during the peak for the construction of the marine terminal alone,” said Jordan, adding that the Kitimat operation should provide 165 long-term jobs and $17 million per year in wages in terms of terminal staff, marine services, a fleet of tugboats, and environmental monitors.

“The project will create 561 jobs in B.C.,” she continued. “Now those are on-going, permanent jobs. Permanent operations will employ 78 people at various locations throughout B.C. There will be about 52 workers in

the Kitimat area. And then some regional residents are expected to be hired for direct operational jobs.”

A significant component of the employment created by the project is expected to be about 20,500 person-years of what Jordan calls “indirect or induced labour.”

“So,” Jordan said, “that would include things like hotels, trucking, electrical and mechanical contracting, transportation – a variety of things. Even things like logging and salvage for some of the right-of-way clearing.

Restoration of a site. Supplies, whether that’s gravel or concrete. Some building materials, fuel, rentals, repairs, that kind of services. Obviously, food services and accommodations.”

“People who might be involved in surveying or in construction camps or catering or building access roads,” she continued.

It could even create jobs replanting trees along the right-of-way. continued pg 7

The Enbridge Northern Gateway Project involves a new twin pipeline system running from near Edmonton, Alberta, to a new marine terminal in Kitimat, British Columbia to export petroleum and import condensate.

A frac database for Western Canada james waterman Pipeline News North

The energy sector now has a new online tool for finding information about hydraulic fracturing operations in western Canada.

The Western Canada Frac Database, produced in partnership between Canadian Discovery and Introspec Energy Group, hit the web in October, 2010 and is currently being updated daily with new data about completed wells, including stress numbers, frac gradient numbers, costs, timelines, technology used, problems that the producers encountered, and comments and analysis by Canadian Discovery’s own engineers.

“When wells are fracture completed,

they submit a report to the various governments: Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, B.C.,” said Matt Baird, Director of ITIS for Canadian Discovery. “And then we’re going to these governments, we’re getting the reports from the wells that have been done, and then we’re taking these reports, we’re scanning them, turning them into PDFs. “We bookmark the PDFs. And then we take the data out of the PDFs and put it into a database. Then we break it up by stages.”

Technicians and engineering students do all of the indexing under the supervision of engineers, as it is a task that requires “a level of understanding about fracturing and completion technology.”

“We’ve found that it’s not a data entry job,” Baird added.

Baird admits that the primary target audience for the database is the oil and

gas industry, including everybody from geologists to engineers, but also suggests that this collection of data could prove useful to the service sector and financial institutions as well.

“Some of this data has never actually been put into a place like this before, so it’s hard to tell exactly how people are going to use some of it,” said Baird, noting that it could have a wide array of applications.

“If you’ve done a well,” he began, offering a hypothetical situation, “and someone down the road is getting better results than you: why? Did they use a different technology? Did they use a different company? Did they use more stages?”

It is also a project that has been in the works for some time.

“We have been looking at the data for a while,” said Baird. “And then we

started kind of getting serious about it about eight months ago.”

Ultimately, Canadian Discovery decided it would be a valuable asset to the industry.

“As far as we could tell when we were going through this, and the process of all the data that’s out there, this is one of the last, if not ‘the’ last big hunk of data out there that hasn’t been put into a searchable, indexed, cleaned-up database,” said Baird.

“Everything else essentially has [been] to this point. And this [information] hasn’t. And in the last five years, there’s been so much done with fracturing in resource plays that this is where the industry is going, and there isn’t a great dataset behind this.

“There isn’t much for completion data to be had [up until now].”

February 2011 I pipeline news north •

7

Replanting trees along the right-of-way, is one example of “indirect or induced labour.” Such employment represents a significant component of the number of jobs expected to be created by the project. Other jobs would include trucking, electrical and mechanical contracting, transportation, logging and salvage for right-of-way clearing and site restoration and many others.

Photo courtesy of enbridge

cont’d from pg 6 Jordan had no specific information or data as to how much local northeastern B.C. labour will be involved in pipeline construction or other associated industries such as road construction, but she did stress that Enbridge is committed to hiring locally and contracting local businesses.

“When we look through the socio-economic evaluation,” said Jordan, “we are expecting that the job will generate $4.3 billion in labour income during construction. And we certainly do anticipate that many of those jobs will go to residents of northern B.C. And as the project progresses, we’ll make sure that British Columbians and B.C. businesses have the opportunity to benefit directly from employment and procurement.”

“When we evaluate the project in terms of the socioeconomic view,” she continued, “we look over a thirty year cycle for a pipeline. That’s just the cycle they use. So, over thirty years in B.C., it’s $1.2 billion in tax revenue. So, there is significant opportunity for British Columbia and British Columbians to benefit from this project.”

An intriguing aspect of the project at this stage is that First Nations are among the most vocal opponents, but are also among those who may stand to benefit from the development.

“Certainly, Enbridge is committed to aboriginal engagement on this project,” said Jordan. “We have been consulting with aboriginal communities along the pipeline right-of-way since about 2002. And Northern Gateway wants to ensure maximum participation of the aboriginal communities in a meaningful economic opportunity that arises from the project. And those would include equity ownership, directed procurement, employment and sole sourcing.

“So, currently, we’re meeting with aboriginal groups along the pipeline right-of-way to talk to them about equity participation in the project. And once we have completed those meetings with First Nations along the pipeline right-of-way, we’ll be in a better position to share details about that equity offer.”

“But, “ continued Jordan, “Enbridge has a very long history of working with aboriginal communities. We have a detailed aboriginal peoples policy. And have had great success on some projects in the past. So, we’re certainly, again, wanting to ensure maximum participation of those communities in really meaningful ways. And we think one of the most meaningful ways that they could participate is through equity ownership.”

One of the concerns of First Nations is also the concern of environmental groups who are opposed to the project: the potential for environmental damage. So, the trick for Enbridge is balancing the realization of the

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economic potential of the project and mitigating the environmental disturbance caused by the construction and the potential environmental risks of a marine terminal for exporting and importing petroleum products.

“Enbridge has sixty years of experience safely building and operating pipelines,” said Jordan. “We’re dedicated to the safe transportation of petroleum products … and we would not have proposed this project if we did not think that it could be safely built and operated.

“This project has the potential to open new markets for Canadian products, to create jobs and opportunities that will benefit all of Canada, but in particular, British Columbians and Albertans. Significant tax revenues.

Significant long-term jobs.

“Certainly, in an area like Kitimat where there just isn’t a lot of opportunity for new long-term jobs, there’s not a lot of other options there. So, 165 jobs – if you’re Vancouver, that might seem a small amount, but it’s not.

And it’s a significant amount to people in the Kitimat region. And, again, it’s a significant tax revenue to the province, not just during construction, but during ongoing operations.”

“We think it’s a very solid project,” she concluded.

“We’re comfortable that we can build it safely and operate it safely. That it will have significant and lasting economic benefit for the people of B.C. and for Canada as a whole.”

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8 • PIPELINE NEWS NORTH I February 2011

special feature

gwyn morgan

- a road to the Order of Canada james waterman Pipeline News North

When it was announced at the end of December that Gwyn Morgan had been named to the Order of Canada in recognition of his lifetime of work in the Canadian oil and gas industry, it came as no surprise to his longtime friend, Dick Wilson.

“I nominated him,” Wilson said with a laugh. “It’s something that I felt was long overdue.”

Wilson has known Morgan for twentyfour years, ever since Morgan was the Senior Vice President in charge of oil and gas at Alberta Energy, and Wilson had to sit himself down in front of his desk for a “very intimidating” interview. Wilson got the job, eventually becoming the Vice President of Public Affairs at Encana after Morgan led the merger between Alberta Energy and PanCanadian Energy in 2002, consequently creating the Canadian petroleum giant.

Wilson describes his old friend and colleague using words and phrases like “loyal” and “highly professional” and

“extremely ethical.” As he tells anecdotes that attempt to describe Morgan’s character as a businessman, as a philanthropist, and as a champion of the oil and gas industry in Canada, the word that pops up again and again is integrity.

It seems that Morgan was born to personify that trait.

The story of his journey toward membership in the Order of Canada began just as so many of these stories do, as the tale of a child from a humble and hardworking Canadian family.

“I was raised on a farm west of a little town called Carstairs, which is northwest of Calgary, just on the edge of the foothills,” said Morgan. “Like a lot of little towns, it was on the rail line between Calgary and Edmonton. And it was a typical little prairie town with the grain elevators. Virtually all of the shops and services that we used were right in the little main street.”

“We worked hard,” he continued. “We had lots of challenges with crop failures and things. But I never could have imagined having better roots. I mean, you learn resiliency. You learn effort.

Responsibility. And I had great parents.

That was my upbringing.”

“At the very foundation of who I am were the value systems that my parents passed on to me. Integrity. And always

Retirement

being truthful. A sense of morality. All those things. Those are grassroots fundamentals that I’ve always believed you never compromise no matter what. And so if I have a reputation that I treasure most in business and in general, it would be … a sense of strong integrity and a sense of fairness that they passed on to me. And through my whole career, fortunately, I never compromised. And it was also, interestingly enough, maybe one of the very leading reasons why the company was successful.”

“Good people want to know that the leadership you have can be trusted and they really care and they’re not just in it for themselves,” Morgan explained.

“Those are things that I learned early.

And maybe were in some ways the key to what happened later.”

His parents not only taught him the value of hard work and integrity, but his father also happened to gently push him toward his career, which was inevitably a push in the right direction. Morgan only required that gentle push because all he knew early in his university career was that he was a good math and science student. He was not yet certain of a vocation that would allow him to take advantage of his talents until his father suggested engineering.

“And he only knew engineering because he had a little road-building

business on the side. And he met some engineers and thought it was a pretty good job,” Morgan said, chuckling. “That was what got me into engineering.”

Morgan laughs when he thinks about his move into engineering, partly because he feels that so many children only dream of taking up the professions that they know, such as doctors or teachers, and so few seem to know the duties of an engineer.

“They should know what engineers do because virtually everything in the world is engineered,” he said. “We’re in the most technological age ever and there isn’t anything in terms of where we live, how we live, where we drive, what we drive, how we fly, how we communicate that isn’t engineered.”

“And they all say, ‘What does an engineer do?’” he adds, chuckling again. “So, there isn’t any more broad and exciting field, but there’s not a TV program about it.”

After completing his engineering degree at the University of Alberta, Morgan took his first step into the oil and gas business. He recalls that at that time all of the Canadian-owned companies were small independents struggling to compete with major companies that had their headquarters beyond our borders. continued pg 9

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February 2011 I pipeline news north •

Each region has something different to contribute to the economy, to the social atmosphere, to the culture of the country.”

That is Morgan’s philosophy.

His pride in Canada and its energy sector eventually led him to tackle one of its newest institutions in the early 1980s: the National Energy Program (NEP).

“The National Energy Program goes back to the days of [former Prime Minister] Pierre Trudeau and [former Minister of Finance and Minster of Energy, Mines and Resources] Marc Lalonde, where they were basically out to tax the oil and gas industry in western Canada,” said Wilson. “And it devastated – it devastated – the oil and gas industry to the point of – I don’t know whether it was forty or sixty billion – billion with a b – dollars.”

“Gwyn was at that time the president of the Independent Petroleum Association of Canada, which is now the Canadian Petroleum Association,” Wilson continued.

“And he was diligent in efforts to team up with others and dismantle the NEP when the Conservatives came into power.”

Now the oil and gas business in Canada is experiencing an entirely different set of circumstances. It is among the leading industries in the country and provincial governments –

Gwyn Morgan, former President and CEO of Encana, was named to the Order of Canada in December, 2010 in recognition of his philanthropy and hard work in Canada’s oil and gas sector.

(Photo courtesy of Encana)

cont’d from pg 8 Most of the jobs in his field were with those big foreign-owned operations and so he naturally gravitated towards those opportunities, even though he was eager to help Canada really make its mark in the sector.

“When we had the opportunity to start Alberta Energy Company in 1975,” he said, “my big motivation was that I could be somewhere where we could make decisions at home.”

Morgan was twenty-nine years old, just eight years out of university, a period during which he had always had to report to a head office in the United States as part of his first company job in the industry.

“I was really excited about a Canadian company that would be owned by Canadians,” he said of the creation of Alberta Energy.

Alberta Energy began as a resource company with its hand in a range of areas including petroleum products, pipelining, fertilizer plants and forest products.

Morgan was the first man in the fledgling

organization’s oil and gas group.

“In April of 1976,” he began, “we were all set and had everything organized and we started a drilling program. A natural gas drilling program. And one of my great memories was we had what we call a spud-in ceremony of the very first well to be drilled by the company.

And I had this enormous Canadian flag flying in the wind from the top of this rig.”

“And I just remember sitting there and watching that flag and saying, ‘You know, this is not only the beginning of what we hope will be a successful company, but also symbolic of my own passion about Canadians doing something on their own.’”

It is just one example of a level of patriotism that Wilson characterizes as a “fierce pride in the country.”

“Not just in the country,” he added, “but in the country’s ability and potential.

particularly in the resource hotbeds of British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan – are striving toward streamlining the regulatory processes and instituting favourable fiscal regimes to promote investment and development.

Wilson feels that Morgan has played a significant role in that change.

“He has been instrumental in, shall we say, helping government better understand the industry,” said Wilson. “Gwyn is never one to shy away from offering an opinion when it’s warranted. I wouldn’t say he’s opinionated, but if he has an issue and he believes strongly about it, he will enunciate it.”

9

Morgan certainly is not shy about his opinion of the value of the industry.

“I think that one of the things that I tried to do when I was involved in the industry was to help people understand, first of all, how important it is to the country,” he said. “And, second of all, that providing energy for people … is a necessary and absolutely noble endeavor. And I think too often in the industry we spend time apologizing for being the oil and gas business. Or companies think, ‘Well, I’m going to go buy five windmills and I’ll talk about the windmills and not the oil and gas.’”

“What I always tried to do was have our people understand that they’re working for a great company, they’re working for a company that they can trust, has a social and environmental responsibility ethic, and in an industry that is providing a very important, crucial service to people. And I think that … leaders in industry need to say that more often.”

“I’ve operated and seen operations throughout the world,” he continued, “and I’ll compare our oil sands with what’s going on in the Niger Delta or in government companies in Ecuador any day.”

Morgan eventually became CEO of Alberta Energy, assuming the role vacated by the company’s founder, Dave Mitchell. Mitchell has also been named to the Order of Canada in recognition of his contribution to Canadian life, a fact that makes the honour “even more special” for Morgan.

“Dave and I connected on several different levels,” said Morgan, describing his predecessor as a good and trustworthy man who shared the values that Morgan had inherited from his parents.

However, the duo had their differences as well. “Dave grew up in a different age,” he continued, “and he had a different perspective on things in terms of where the world was going. He believed the company should be diversified. And I ended up focusing it. But that was also because that was the changing times. At the time when we started Alberta Energy, there was this widespread thought that you shouldn’t just be in one business, like in oil and gas. You should be in a number of businesses.”

Alberta Energy was not as diversified as other companies at the time, preferring to solely concentrate on natural resources, but Morgan was still eager to narrow the focus even further.

“His era was diversification,” Morgan explained. “And it was what everybody thought was right. What I guess I learned from that was that it’s very hard to be really good at a whole bunch of different things, because you lose your focus.

Every business is so difficult and so competitive that you better really focus.

And when we really focused the company, we grew best.” continued pg 26

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www.remaxaction.ca

10 • PIPELINE NEWS NORTH I February 2011

profiles

fsj’s landman - knowing the people is the key

james waterman Pipeline News North

It appears as though Brian Vermeulen has finally found his home as a resident of northeast British Columbia and the president of BV Land Consulting and Northern Rockies Environmental Services in Fort St. John.

He has been slowly gravitating toward this region and his present career since he was a child in a small Saskatchewan town of just 350 people. He would eventually move to southern Manitoba, where he would learn about agriculture and communicating with landowners such as farmers and ranchers while buying product for a grain company. That was all before venturing into Alberta and the oil and gas industry.

“I had moved to Calgary in 1992,” Vermeulen recalled, “doing some occupational health and safety consulting at that time. And then sort of realized that wasn’t really going to work out. And my brother, who is a landman like myself, was the one that convinced me, with my agricultural background and all that, to basically become a landman. So, with that I got into working as a landman back at that time.”

His first real foray into the business was with the now defunct Encal Energy, where he was supervising land acquisitions, community relations and media relations for their western Canadian operations. Vermeulen describes Encal as “probably one of the most active companies in northeast B.C. back in those days.”

That was when he began his relationship with the region as well.

Encal was eventually bought out by Calpine Corporation. Vermeulen remained in his position with that company for another year before deciding it was time to move on to the next endeavor.

“And, the next thing you know, I started my own company here in the North,” he said. “Because everybody basically knew me already up here. It was a good fit.”

BV Land has been in operation for approximately eight years now. Vermeulen spent the first four years of its existence commuting back and forth between Calgary and Fort St. John until the persistent growth of the business convinced him that it was finally time to plant roots in the community.

“It was an easy transition for me because I already knew people up here,” said Vermeulen, noting that some of his old Encal colleagues who worked in Fort St. John during his days with that outfit are still in Fort St. John, but now plying their trades for other companies.

“I live up north of Rose Prairie,” he continued. “And I’m living up in an area where, during my days with Encal, we were very active. And I’m living next to the neighbours that already knew me.”

His familiarity with the region and its people has proven to be an asset. As a landman, he assists with oil and gas industry chores such as surface rights acquisitions, selecting access road and pipeline routes, and a variety of related planning and administrative tasks, all through BV Land. Northern Rockies Environmental covers items such as soils handling, drilling waste management, and a variety of other environmental services, including those in the spheres of site reclamation and forestry. His firsthand knowledge of the industry players working in the region, as well as the local landowners and their concerns, has made his important role in the conversations between the two sides a relatively easy one. Vermeulen has said that he often plays the part of “a mediator or a negotiator.”

“Yes, we get paid by the oil company,” he admitted. “We’re acting on behalf of the oil company. But we’re sort of hoping to make sure that we are doing our best to take the interests of the landowners in mind when we’re sitting down, dealing with a project on their property. This still comes back to educating people on the activity … and the regulations themselves. That’s where we struggle lots, because sometimes there’s a

above: Brian Vermeulen, President of BV Land Consulting and Northern Rockies Environmental Services, points out aspects of a plant and pipeline project in northwestern Alberta. BV Land is often involved in these types of projects in terms of planning, acquiring surface rights and selecting pipeline routes.

James Waterman photo

left: Lane Giesbrecht, an Environmental Consultant with Northern Rockies Environmental Services, obtains soil depths on a winter Schedule A Assessment. It is one of the tasks that the Northern Rockies staff performs on a regular basis.

Photo courtesy of Northern Rockies Environmental Services

disconnect between what we’re trying to communicate, and what falls under the regulation, compared to what maybe their general knowledge is. So, our biggest thing is to make sure we’re educating everybody.”

One of the significant challenges of working as a landman in northeast B.C. is educating landowners about the various facets of what Vermeulen describes as the province’s “ever-evolving … regulatory climate.”

Vermeulen insists it is important for the province to inform the public of those regulations through governmental bodies such as the BC Oil and Gas Commission, but he also feels it is his obligation as a landman to ensure that landowners understand the responsibilities of the provincial government, as well as the responsibilities of his land company and the energy companies with which he works.

“If there’s some issues that come back with the landowners,” Vermeulen added, “we want to make sure we try to communicate that back to the company.”

Part of his job is to ensure that oil and gas companies follow through on the conditions of agreements signed with landowners in areas such as traffic, dust and noise issues, site reclamations, and limiting the impact of construction on farming operations.

“We have to make sure there’s follow through on that,” he said. “And sometimes that doesn’t happen.

That’s where tensions start to develop because there’s a disconnect. And it’s not from our end here. We’re sort of hoping that the oil companies will follow through on those commitments. That’s the odd time we will start getting a phone call back from a landowner who says, ‘Brian, they

haven’t followed up on this.’”

“We’ve been able to follow up on it and get everything cleared up,” Vermeulen continued. “And that’s the benefit that I think we have up here, because it is a small community, we know all the players, we know everybody involved. If you’re down in Calgary … there’s not a lot of follow through on that point. So, I think just the relationship here in the community, with knowing people, and them knowing you, I’ve actually had landowners that will phone me and say, ‘Brian, we’ve got a problem out here.

You guys didn’t handle this, but we don’t know who to get a hold of.’”

Often these problems arise through mergers or acquisitions where a facility, such as a well site or a pipeline, has changed hands to a different company than the one with whom the landowner signed the original agreement.

“And all of a sudden the landowner’s like, ‘Who’s supposed to be looking after this? We haven’t seen a rent check.’ And I’ve gotten phone calls: ‘Brian, we don’t know who to talk to. Can you help us out?’ And then we’ll just, out of courtesy, due to our connections in the oil patch and Calgary, we’ll track them down and say, ‘Here. Here’s who owns it now. And here’s the person to contact.’”

Vermeulen hopes this approach is bringing a greater degree of accountability to the industry in terms of these types of issues.

“I tell my staff here,” he concluded, “if we get a phone call from a landowner and we don’t know anything about it, we have all the tools to find out the information.”

“It’s a courtesy.”

February 2011 I pipeline news north •

environmental

11

noel project

- minimizing the carbon footprint james waterman Pipeline News North

Last November, Apache Canada officially took over the operation of the Noel natural gas development in northeast British Columbia after agreeing to acquire the site from BP during the summer of 2010.

The facility quickly surpassed Apache’s initial production projections by achieving the 100 million cubic feet of gas per day (MMcfd) mark by the middle of December.

However, this is only part of the remarkable tale of this innovative operation.

“The Noel project minimizes the footprint by utilizing seventy per cent less surface land than conventional drilling,” said Apache spokesperson Paul Wyke.

Through creative use of multi-pad horizontal wells and right-of-ways, the Noel project is able to reach production targets with only 111 wells, whereas a conventional development would require a total of 592 wells to achieve the same results.

“Noel produces eighty-five per cent less greenhouse gases and reduces the noise impact through the use of electric-driven compressors and variable frequency drive motors at the facility sites,” Wyke continued, noting that the electricity is also supplied by BC Hydro, which is eighty per cent hydro generated. continued pg 28

Solar panels at Apache Canada’s Noel site generate energy for the project’s operations and help reduce its overall carbon footprint.

Photo courtesy of Apache Canada

Oil and Gas — Fast Facts Compliance Compliance and and Enforcement Enforcement in in British British Columbia’s Columbia’s oil oil and and gas gas industry industry

The The Commission Commission has has offices offices throughout throughout British Columbia and employs British Columbia and employs over over 200 200 British Columbians who are committed British Columbians who are committed to to preserving preserving the the province’s province’s quality quality of of life. life.

Come Come see see us us at at the the office office in in your your region: region: •• Fort Fort St. St. John, John, #100-10003 #100-10003 110 110 Avenue Avenue •• Fort Fort Nelson, Nelson, #101-4701 #101-4701 55 55 Street Street •• Dawson Dawson Creek, Creek, #3-1445 #3-1445 102 102 Avenue Avenue To To learn learn more more visit visit www.bcogc.ca www.bcogc.ca Follow us on Twitter Follow us on Twitter Phone Phone 1-250-794-5200 1-250-794-5200

who who

what what

when when

why why

not not addressed, addressed, the the company company may may be be subject subject to to further action, including a complete shutdown further action, including a complete shutdown of of the the operation. operation. New New authority authority under under the the Oil Oil and and Gas Gas Activities Activities Act Act provides provides for for penalties penalties of of up up to to $1.5 million and/or imprisonment. $1.5 million and/or imprisonment.

What What happens happens when when there’s there’s aa complaint? complaint?

When a landowner, citizen, When a landowner, citizen, First First Nations Nations or or company makes a complaint to the company makes a complaint to the Commission, Commission, an an inspector inspector gathers gathers and and confirms confirms the the details. details. A A search for prior complaints from the complainant search for prior complaints from the complainant is is conducted conducted to to determine determine whether whether itit is is new new or or ongoing. ongoing. IfIf new, new, the the incident incident or or complaint complaint is is entered entered into into aa database. database.

Depending Depending on on the the assessed assessed risk, risk, an an inspector inspector follows up with a site inspection or follows up with a site inspection or aa call call to to the the company. company. Field Field inspectors inspectors ensure ensure effective effective enforcement enforcement of of provincial provincial laws laws and and regulations regulations that relate to oil and gas development. that relate to oil and gas development.

The The Commission Commission works works closely closely with with other other agencies in investigating and enforcing agencies in investigating and enforcing provincial provincial requirements, requirements, including including the the Ministry Ministry of of Environment, Environment, Ministry Ministry of of Agriculture, Agriculture, Ministry Ministry of of Forests, Forests, Mines Mines and and Lands, Lands, Agricultural Agricultural Land Land Commission Commission and and WorkSafeBC WorkSafeBC to to bring bring an an issue issue to to resolution. resolution.

The The Commission Commission is is committed committed to to working working with the public and industry to ensure with the public and industry to ensure that that

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fair, fair, workable workable and and enforceable enforceable regulations regulations are are in place.

The Commission’s inspection in place. The Commission’s inspection and and enforcement enforcement officers officers are are committed committed professionals professionals who ensure industry meets who ensure industry meets or or exceeds exceeds regulations regulations to to ensure ensure safety safety of of everyone. everyone.

When When an an incident incident is is reported... reported...

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Commission Commission or or PEP* PEP* receives receives aa call call

Commission’s Commission’s 24-hour 24-hour emergency emergency officer officer answers answers

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The The BC BC Oil Oil and and Gas Gas Commission Commission (Commission) is (Commission) is an an independent, independent, single-window single-window regulatory regulatory agency agency with with responsibilities for overseeing responsibilities for overseeing oil oil and and gas gas operations operations in in British British Columbia, Columbia, including including exploration, exploration, development, development, pipeline pipeline transportation transportation and and reclamation. reclamation.

What What is is it? it?

The The Commission’s Commission’s Compliance Compliance and and Enforcement Enforcement unit unit is is part part of of our our Project Project Assessment Assessment and and Compliance Compliance Assurance Assurance Division.

Division.

In In the the field, field, compliance compliance and and enforcement enforcement inspectors conduct site inspections, inspectors conduct site inspections, respond respond to to incidents, incidents, and and address address complaints complaints from from landowners, landowners, First First Nations, Nations, the the public public and and other other stakeholders. stakeholders.

The The Commission Commission inspects inspects on-the-ground on-the-ground activities including, activities including, but but not not limited limited to, to, geophysical geophysical operations, construction, drilling, operating operations, construction, drilling, operating wells, wells, pipelines, pipelines, facilities facilities and and gas gas plants, plants, restoration restoration and and incidents. incidents.

Inspections Inspections and and enforcement enforcement ensure ensure the the continued safe development and continued safe development and operation operation of of oil oil and and gas gas activities activities in in British British Columbia.

Columbia. Results Results of of inspections inspections are are tracked tracked and and ifif necessary necessary brought to the attention of brought to the attention of the the company company for for action. action.

Inspectors Inspectors have have authority authority to to order order corrective corrective work work or or to to shut shut down down operations operations not not complying complying with with regulations. regulations.

IfIf aa company company is is found found to to have have a: a: (1) (1) high-risk high-risk deficiency, it must respond with immediate deficiency, it must respond with immediate action; action; (2) (2) low-risk low-risk deficiency, deficiency, itit has has 14-30 14-30 days, days, depending on the situation and associated depending on the situation and associated risk, risk, to to deal deal with with the the situation situation to to the the satisfaction satisfaction of of the the Commission.

Commission. IfIf aa non-compliance non-compliance issue issue is is

Advanced Advanced investigation investigation may may involve involve WorkSafeBC, WorkSafeBC, Fisheries Fisheries and and Oceans Oceans Canada Canada and/ and/ or Environment or Environment Canada Canada

Commission’s Commission’s inspector inspector contacts contacts the company and/or the company and/or visits visits the the site site to to confirm confirm details details and and assess assess the the issue issue

Incident Incident is is resolved resolved and and company company submits submits aa post-incident post-incident report report to to the Commission.

Follow-ups the Commission. Follow-ups and/ and/ or or steps steps are are taken taken ifif necessary necessary

*PEP is the Provincial Emergency Program *PEP is the Provincial Emergency Program

12 • PIPELINE NEWS NORTH I February 2011

careers & training

keeping it local

- trades training at NLC james waterman Pipeline News North

Matt Zarichney has worked in the oil and gas industry for thirty years. He has his Second Class Power Engineering ticket and has had plenty of firing time on big boilers as a Power Engineer.

He has done gas processing and has run 55-megawatt generators, and he is just a few years away from early retirement. However, he is not about to ride off into the sunset. Instead, he is pursuing a new career in the energy sector through one of the trades, apprenticeship and technology programs offered by Northern Lights College.

Zarichney is currently completing Level 3 Apprenticeship Technical Training in the Industrial Instrumentation Mechanic Apprenticeship program at the Fort St. John campus, a course of study that offers career opportunities in industries such as pulp and paper, power generation and resource mining, including the oil and gas sector.

“Well, it was a bit of a drop in pay, but it was something I’ve wanted to do,” he said, explaining his decision to return to school after so many years in the workforce. “It’s a very challenging field to get into, and it was something I wish I would have had the opportunity twenty years ago, but you don’t pass it up when it comes along.”

“This is actually topping off my long career in oil and gas,” he added. “And it’s kind of nice.”

His daughter is somewhat following in his footsteps, as she began a Foundation program in February of this year, and will be enrolling in the Power Engineering and Gas Processing program in September.

Those are just two of the many ways that students can get an education at Northern Lights that will allow them to find a job through the energy sector in this region.

“We have a multitude of different trades, apprenticeship and technology programs at Northern Lights College,” said Jeff Lekstrom, Dean of Trades and Apprenticeship. “We have many that we class as Foundation programs. And what those are, basically, we have programs that are trade related. The students come into them for five months, seven months, eight months, ten months [for] some of them, and our longest one is fifteen months long. Most of them are based on the semester system because we align ourselves with the high schools here for dual credit. We have mixed cohorts of both adult learners and high school learners in the same class. That allows the high school learners to get credit toward [secondary school] graduation and a trade at the same time. So, those are called our Foundation programs. And all of our programs are authorized and credentialed through the Industry Training Authority of British Columbia or the BC Safety Authority, or other regulatory bodies throughout the province of British Columbia.”

Lekstrom notes that the student body is quite diverse, ranging in age from 18

to 60 years old, and including individuals who have retired from various other careers, including retired teachers and retired RCMP officers.

“We have apprenticeship programs that take you right through from Level 1 Apprenticeship right through to Level 4 and Red Seal training,” he continued. “And that allows you to complete everything.

Once you start a program with Northern Lights College, anything else to do with your apprenticeship, you can finish it with us. You don’t have to travel anywhere else to get your certification or qualifications.”

Although the Oil and Gas Field Operations program may be the most obvious avenue into the oil and gas industry at the college, Lekstrom insists that all of the trades, apprenticeship and technology programs can lead to jobs made possible by the energy sector, including the Aircraft Maintenance Engineering program, which attracts students from across Canada, and other countries as well. Students with culinary aspirations can even find employment through the industry as cooks at the relatively luxurious modern work camps after attending the college.

One of those technology programs is the two year Land and Resource Management (LRM) program that is being converted to a ten month Environmental Practice certificate program beginning in September, 2011. It can lead to work through the oil and gas industry with companies such as BV Land Consulting and its affiliate, Northern Rockies Environmental Services.

Erin O’Donnell, Surface Land Consultant and Land Manger with BV Land, and Margi Weekes, Project Coordinator with Northern Rockies Environmental, graduated from the LRM program together in 2004. Both women were born and raised in the Fort St. John area, where they have always enjoyed the opportunities for outdoor recreation right next door to the oil patch. All of those elements culminated in a career when they discovered the opportunity to study topics such as land reclamation and remediation through the LRM program at Northern Lights.

“I grew up riding quads and sleds and – you know, an outdoors girl,” said O’Donnell.

“I grew up doing a lot of outdoorsy stuff,” Weekes echoed. “And we now have a farm. And it was just kind of appealing to me.”

“I don’t do the paperwork side like she does,” she continued, pointing to O’Donnell. “I go out and do field assessments and do soil assessments and all that.”

Brian Vermeulen, President of BV Land and Northern Rockies Environmental, has a great deal of respect and appreciation for what Northern Lights has done with its LRM program. According to Vermeulen, individuals would have had to travel to Alberta to enroll in a college program of that nature in the past; so, he is pleased that local residents can now train locally to work in the industry that is right in their own backyard, not just in companies such as his own, but also in areas such as oilfield operations and pipeline construction. continued pg 13

Industrial Instrumentation Mechanic students at Northern Lights College gain practical experience in their classrooms in the college’s Industry Training Centre. The facility was built with the help of contributions from oil and gas companies that operate in the region.

February 2011 I pipeline news north •

13

Opposite page top: An Oil and Gas Field Operations student at Northern Lights College prepares for a career in the oil patch. The college offers two intakes of sixteen students each year.

Right: Northern Lights College gives its Power Engineering students 160 hours of firing time on their boiler, which allows them to be certified through the BC Safety Authority, that regulatory body that governs Power Engineers in the province.

Photos courtesy of Northern Lights College

cont’d from pg 12 “That has had a huge benefit,” he said, “Everybody that – as you noticed in Northern Rockies – that works for us … they’re born and raised here,” Vermeulen continued. “They went to the college.

They took the program. They’re still here.

And they’re still working. So, huge benefits to that.”

O’Donnell and Weekes seem to truly enjoy the careers they have forged since graduation.

“I like communicating with my clients,” said O’Donnell. “I like speaking to people every day. What I do is, I have different clients I work for. And I submit wells and pipelines and facilities for them to get drilling permits. And you’re kind of like a troubleshooter. You have to be very organized and you have to have meetings with them and ensure that their projects are submitted in a timely manner.”

Weekes’ job is slightly different.

“I actually receive a package from someone like Erin,” she explained. “And she’ll let us know there’s a well site or pipeline or something that needs constructed. So, myself and another member, or another crew, would go out, and we’ll actually do the soil assessments on that.

We create a package. And then it comes back to the construction people and to the Oil and Gas Commission. We also deal with drilling waste. So, we deal with drilling waste disposal, mud sampling.

We work a little bit directly on the rigs.

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We have people that have to go out to the rigs. And my day’s pretty awesome.

I Ski-Doo in the winter and quad in the summer.”

Lenore Mallis, another recent LRM graduate, is following a slightly different path than those taken by O’Donnell and Weekes.

“After your first year in the LRM program,” she said, “you have to do a practicum at a company in town. So, a company called Eco-Web Ecological Consulting gave me a try for my practicum.

And then after my practicum, they kept me on for the summer. Then they rehired me on last summer for the summer. So, I’ve done two summers with them. They work for oil and gas companies doing ecological consulting.”

Mallis is presently completing a few additional credits at Northern Lights in preparation for a fish and wildlife degree program at the University of Northern British Columbia, a move that was inspired by her time with Eco-Web. “The reason I decided to go further was working at Eco-Web,” she explained.

“Everyone who’s working there is a biologist. And they work directly for the oil and gas company, really, consulting on these issues. I didn’t have a great background in that, and so that’s why I decided to go back to school, just to get a better background so I can do more work in that area.”

Mallis has enjoyed her studies at North-

ern Lights, too.

“The classes are really small and so it’s really personal,” she said. “You have a lot of one-on-one with your teachers.

It’s fairly inexpensive as far as going to a college, especially in B.C. Most of your credits transfer really nicely into B.C. universities. So, that part’s a bonus.”

Despite these kinds of success stories, the college has had to make the switch to a ten month Environmental Practice program because the idea of a twoyear commitment to the LRM program appeared to be too daunting for many prospective students. Enrollment numbers were low and so a change was deemed necessary.

“We basically removed most of the university transfer courses from the LRM program and kept the very land specific courses,” said Lisa Verbisky, a very popular instructor in the LRM program.

“So, for example, we have a land reclamation course and an introduction to remediation course, and we maintained all those courses, but we took out things like geography – the more general knowledge courses. I would say that now the program teaches someone to be more of a field technician than perhaps someone – well, certainly, you can’t go on now and get a professional designation, which you can with a diploma. So, now you are just a field technician.”

Clearly, Verbisky has her reservations about the change, particularly when

considering how the old LRM program served as a stepping stone to a university education.

“I have many LRM graduates who have gone on or [are] currently seeking to go on to university,” she said. “And so this was a very strong pathway. In fact, I’ve got a graduate right now who got a complete two year – as they call a block transfer [of credits] – to the University of Lethbridge environmental science program. That’s very powerful. Our hopes are in the future to bring back that second year of the program so we can continue that service for the students.

“But the reality of it is that as good as the program was – LRM – and as many jobs as there are out there, we just didn’t have the students. And we couldn’t keep running the program with, you know, five students.”

“And from what the recruiters say,” she continued, “selling the two year program is very difficult, whereas selling a one year program is more along the lines of what people are interested in. And what I hope is that, once they are in a one year program, they’ll see the value of getting that second year and maybe that will allow us to bring it back.”

However, Verbisky also notes that those university transfer courses run as part of other programs regardless; so, those options remain available to interested students. continued pg 28

14 • PIPELINE NEWS NORTH I February 2011

profiles

going modular

- all the comforts of home james waterman Pipeline News North

If you work in the oil and gas industry in northeast British Columbia and you have been noticing that your work camp accommodations are becoming quite comfortable these days, you may want to tip your hard hat to Greg Hammond, President of Greensmart Manufacturing. Hammond and his company are experts at producing the Structural Insulated Panels – or SIPs – that comprise the energy efficient well site units that are becoming increasingly popular with the companies working in the region. They also turn those panels into everything from modular homes to hotels.

Even their Fort St. John office is a SIP building.

“The cleaners—they never dust in here,” Hammond said from behind his desk in his surprisingly dust-free office.

“We’ve been in this building for four or five years.”

The reason for his clean office is that the “sandwich panels” of expanded polystyrene foam between two sheets of oriented strandboard “create a very tight envelope system.”

“You don’t have that air infiltration from outside to inside because you have a sealed wall,” Hammond explained, noting that it not only eliminates dust, but also addresses more serious structural and personal health issues such as rot and mildew.

Most importantly, especially to those men and women braving the frigid temperatures of a long winter north of Fort Nelson, it also keeps out the cold.

“We build the walls and the roofs, typically, out of these Structural Insulated Panels,” said Hammond. “So, we have a standard six-and-a-half inch wall panel that we build. So, that’s standard in workforce housing that we do. It’s standard in the residential and commercial—typically—that we do. It has an R-value of approximately R-28. And we typically put an eight-and-a-quarter inch roof on these workforce housing-type buildings. That has an R-value of R-36.

And at the end of the day, it’s a whole value, because it’s an absolute solid core of insulation. There’s no air pockets in it.”

The absence of air pockets is partly attributable to the absence of lumber. The roof sections contain no lumber at all, whereas the wall sections may only have lumber around a door.

“We eliminate about seventy-five percent of the typical lumber that will go into walls,” Hammond added, referring to the difference between SIP buildings and traditional construction methods.

Lumber is also a heat loss zone because wood is only R-1 per inch, which means that a piece of lumber of approximately the same thickness as a SIP wall with an R-value of R-28, only has an R-value of R-6.

“That’s why, typically, you’ll see frost lines on the outside of [traditionally constructed] buildings,” said Hammond.

“That’s the heat going through the building, meeting the cold on the outside, and creating that frost line. And we put better windows and doors, quite frankly, in the buildings as well. So, that adds to the energy efficiencies of them as

These Greensmart well site units are made from durable and energy efficient Structural Insulated Panels or SIPs.

Photo Courtesy of Greensmart Manufacturing

well.”

Energy efficiency is certainly the name of the game for Greensmart and their clientele.

“A standard … energy efficient furnace that would go in these units, that would heat it, you know, puts out in the neighbourhood of eighty to ninety thousand BTUs of heat,” he continued, discussing the benefits of SIP construction. “Well, these buildings require maybe ten to fifteen thousand BTUs of heat, because that’s how energy efficient they are. So, when you heat the inside of them up, it physically maintains or contains the heat without letting it go out. That’s what happens in typical construction, is that heat always wants to go out, where these buildings maintain that.”

Hammond notes that companies have started requisitioning well site housing that does not require propane heat, while he has also begun encouraging the companies to install electric baseboard heaters in the units.

“These buildings are so energy efficient they don’t require that constant heat, heat, heat to heat the building,” said Hammond. “It stays that mean temperature of seventy (degrees Celsius) or wherever you’ve set the thermostat at. And it stays there for hours because the building physically contains the heat – because of the energy efficiency of the panel.”

The product also provides a level of durability that is important when considering that these units are mounted on steel skids and subsequently pulled onto

trucks to be hauled into the wilderness of northeast B.C. Units built by traditional means would bend during that process. Greensmart’s units do not bend.

“We believe we can add a hundred percent of the lifecycle to these buildings built out of this product,” said Hammond. “And, as well, we know that these buildings, right up front, are a given fifty percent more energy efficient than other types of buildings are. And it strictly applies to these workforce housing buildings as well. So, they’re hauling less propane to site. There are less emissions. They’re good for the environment. They’re all those things. They’re more comfortable to be in. They’re warmer, certainly.”

Comfort is also a factor of growing importance with employees spending longer terms in the camps, especially with the increase in year-round activity in the Horn River Basin.

“What we’ve seen and what we’ve heard in the oil industry is that, quite frankly, people were being a little bit more particular about the accommodations they had when they were in the bush,” Hammond added.

“And what we found is that a lot of people—a lot of the consultants that stay in these types of buildings that we do build—is that lots of these people are spending 150 [to] 200 days and more a year, basically, in the bush, or on site somewhere. So, they want to be able to live in nice accommodations, obviously.” continued pg 17

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Greg Hammond, President of Greensmart Manufacturing, shows off a sample of the Structural Insulated Panels or SIPs from which they build their workforce housing for the oil patch. The SIP trailers are more durable and energy efficient than their predecessors. james waterman photo

One of the Greensmart homes delivered to the Halfway River First Nation in November, 2010. The homes, made using the same SIP construction as all of Greensmart’s buildings, are a vast improvement on the old houses at Halfway River.

Photo courtesy of Greensmart Manufacturing

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Oil & Gas - driving northern economic development cont’d from pg 3

“There’s no question that the current gas prices are low,” said Steve Dunk, Manager of B.C. Operations for CAPP. “And the way that we look at that in our industry is that more than anything else it effects the timing. We did an activity survey last year. We haven’t done one yet this year. We’re sort of in the process of doing it. But last year’s activity survey recognized that there’s certainly over the short term some low gas prices. So, how it looked, if you look at a production profile, it was relatively flat, kind of growing slowly over two or three years, and then gradually escalating to the point at which by 2020 we see numbers like a doubling of British Columbia’s gas production. And that’s really driven by the Montney and the Horn. So, when it comes to natural gas prices, we don’t have a crystal ball, and CAPP doesn’t really predict natural gas prices.”

Still, Coad insists that northeastern B.C. is in good shape to take advantage of the opportunities that exist in natural gas, due to its proximity to existing infrastructure and a willing workforce, although he admits that there is work to be done in terms of building new processing facilities and pipelines to access that infrastructure.

“You’re also in a position where conventional gas appears to be in the decline stage and so the capacity is likely to be available,” Coad added, referring to means of transporting the product.

A popular topic of conversation in these communities – particularly Fort Nelson – is the impact in terms of jobs for local residents.

Northern Rockies Regional Municipality

has been working with the Horn River Basin Producers Group on that issue. The Producers Group has made a commitment to hiring locally, but, although there are many contractors in Fort Nelson, they do not necessarily offer all of the services that the industry requires. So other companies are set-

ting up shop in Fort Nelson to take advantage of the Producers Group’s local hiring initiatives. Oil and gas companies are also establishing offices in the town, which has recently led to a shortage of commercial real estate.

Another issue that Coad raised, while discussing the Conference Board study, is how to bridge the gap between the government and industry approach to economic development and the perspective of First Nations.

“You have to say that every effort that can be made needs to be made,” said Coad. “Because you have two cultures with very different views on what economic development means and a constant need to bring those two cultures together. Different views on appropriate timing. Different views on the acceptable level of environmental impacts. Different views on wage versus traditional economies and lifestyles. And so everything that the industry can do needs to be done.”

Dunk agrees with that sentiment.

“One of the things that we always, always say in our presentations, and one of the messages that we always deliver, is that we see a balance between energy, economy and the environment,” said Dunk, discussing CAPP’s efforts to communicate with First Nations and address their concerns. “And we mean that. Energy is important, but it’s finding that balance that’s also important. And that’s one of the jobs, one of the roles for government. It’s also one of the roles for ourselves.”

Dunk notes that CAPP members have met with Treaty 8 First Nations, including Chief Liz Logan, Chief Roland Willson of Moberly Lake First Nation, and Chief Kathi Dickie of Fort Nelson First Nation, and that the industry has a consultation process agreement with those communities.

“One of the things with our industry,” Dunk continued, “as well as having national benefits … we have local benefits.

And hopefully the First Nations community can benefit from that as well. And, yes, they certainly have a traditional attachment to the land. And one of the things we’ve worked with them on, mostly at a smaller scale with companies, but also some CAPP initiatives, is trying to incorporate the traditional – what they call traditional ecological knowledge – into some of the work we do.

And I know through a fund that industry has sponsored (Science Community and Environmental Knowledge Fund or SCEK) and administered through the Oil and Gas Commission, there’s been a number of small studies done on things like what they call ethnobotany.Looking at using traditional plants, that type of thing. Where they are, so that industry is able to avoid them. We’ve also been doing just a little bit of very early work on using some traditional knowledge for lease reclamation.”

Additionally, the Fort Nelson First Nation is finding productive ways to benefit from natural gas development in the Horn River Basin.

“We are a Treaty 8 First Nation,” said Chief Kathi Dickie. “And the Treaty … is peace and sharing. And it’s the ability to make a living off the land. So, all those agreements that we entered all flow from that approach we take, that we’ve taken historically as well. continued pg 17

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February 2011 I pipeline news north •

cont’d from pg 16

The agreements that she mentions are partnerships with industry companies such as TransCanada Pipeline and Spectra Energy, two deals that Dickie considers “success stories” for how those companies approach land stewardship.

Certainly, the Fort Nelson First Nation is encouraging that kind of responsible development.

“The reality is that … the resource sector provides a lot of revenues to the provincial economy in terms of supporting the education system, the health system,” said Dickie. “We’re well aware of how important it is to the Province.

And we know how important it is to the citizens of B.C. But our approach is, ‘Ok, it’s really, really important, but it’s also very, very important that it’s developed in a very sustainable way. That we don’t use it all up now and there’s nothing left for future generations of either First Nations or non-First Nations.’”

Dickie makes this statement as the leader of a community that is not solely interested in environmental matters, but is also actively involved in the oil and gas industry.

“There are a number of our community members that own their own businesses,” she added. “And there is employment through the oil and gas industry.

It’s the major employer in the area. And it’s also the major employer for the Fort Nelson First Nation.”

The provincial government is also concerned with encouraging northern communities and First Nations involvement in the industry, as well as ensuring that they enjoy the benefits.

“We have to continue to work very closely with both local communities and

First Nations in addressing the potential for the industry,” said Thompson. “We’ve worked on revenue sharing agreements, making sure that we continue to have those balanced processes in place.

We’ve also got a strong focus on the development of markets, which is very important for the industry, where B.C. is Canada’s gateway to the Pacific. And we definitely know that that’s going to play a key role in the future of our energy markets. So, there will be a big focus on making sure that we continue to work with industry to help develop those export markets.”

“We expect natural gas demand in the Asia-Pacific – Japan and Korea and China – is going to increase sharply in the next couple of decades,” he continued. “And we’re going to have a growing role in providing that clean-burning fuel to those expanding markets. Obviously, that means we need to focus on making sure that we have the market development, that we have the infrastructure in place to be able to do that. So, investments in projects and infrastructure like the Kitimat LNG (liquid natural gas) plant is going to be very, very critical to the future. We expect that production and shipping to those markets out of there will start in 2014. And so this will have a huge significance for B.C. because, for the first time, part of our natural gas production is going to be exported to those new markets outside of North America.”

Thompson also noted that provincewide benefits of oil and gas development in northeast B.C. include funding for education, health and social service programs, as well as contributing to expanding and improving infrastructure.

Dunk suggests that the benefits extend beyond B.C., citing recent studies by the Canadian Energy Research Institute

The comforts of home cont’d from pg 14

ensuring that the product is of a quality and uniformity that someone can come back three years in a row and have the same experience. Or they can go home and recommend to their friends that they come and their friends have the same experience.”

“Absolutely, the two can be at odds, and are at times,” said Davies, discussing the possibility that the energy sector can have a negative impact on tourism by causing damage to natural spaces.

“While I mentioned [that] energy is driving the province’s economy, it must be harvested in a sustainable manner.”

Tourism Northern Rockies notes that industrial developments are currently far enough away from natural tourist attractions that they do not have a negative impact on tourism in the Fort Nelson area.

“One of things that we have focused on as a province is to make sure that we have the balanced approach to be able to provide the right framework for the development of the industry and these opportunities,” said Thompson.

“But, collectively, both the province and the industry understand the importance of maintaining strong environmental standards and making sure that we have all those standards in place. We’ve done that through the new Oil and Gas Activities Act regulations.

“Industry understands the importance of that. And we’ll continue to work with local governments on it. We’ve had good discussions with the council and local government in Fort Nelson. They’re taking a very proactive approach towards this in terms of planning for the future, which is great to see. They recognize the opportunities are there and will look to continue to be partners going forward in developing all aspects of their economy in the region.”

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The modern amenities in these new SIP well site units include solid oak cabinets, air conditioning, and satellite television.

Greensmart also offers units designed for specific purposes such as offices, medical trailers, and accommodations for engineers and geologists or geophysicists. Most of the buildings are custom made according to the needs of the client. Hammond went into this line of work almost ten years ago, after spending thirty years in the oil and gas industry. He had no previous construction experience, but his experience and the experience of his friends in the oil patch played a prominent role in developing the product and its applications.

“Actually,” Hammond began, “when I got into this business, it was with a friend of mine that was in the oil patch.

And him and another fellow spent about two years doing research into building products and that. And they were looking at some specific areas to build. And when I got involved … I obviously had the benefit of them doing two years of research before I got involved. So, all I had to do was listen to where they were at, what they’d done, how they’d done it, what they’d seen, what the industry had done, and everything else. And we’d all seen the possibilities that this product has. And with the code changes and stuff coming now, it’s really taken off very well.”

The story of Greensmart’s inception has another very interesting element that has also led to an important aspect of Hammond’s vision for the company. In fact, Greensmart really

began with Canadian actor Tom Jackson, a friend of Hammond’s business partner, trying to find a way to provide high quality homes to First Nations communities and improve their quality of life.

“We are just in a process of finishing up a very nice project for the Halfway Reserve,” said Hammond. “And we just built seven new homes for them out of this product. So, we’re looking at putting, again, energy efficient, environmentally friendly, healthy homes in at the Halfway. It’s our first big project there. We’re really looking forward to it. The homes turned out very nice. They picked out some very nice designs. And they’ve been great to work with. So, we’re really looking forward to that.”

Greensmart is also working on developing projects with other First Nations who are noticing the work being done at Halfway and enthusiastically considering the possibilities for their own communities.

Hammond is excited about the prospects as well, noting that SIP modular homes can constitute a “total 180 degree switch” in terms of housing on First Nations reserves.

“There are some First Nations programs that are out there right now that are SIP specific,” he said. “They are not looking for traditional built homes anymore. They want these SIP type buildings.”

Greensmart currently employs approximately 200 people between their offices in Fort St. John and manufacturing facilities in Dawson Creek and Abbotsford, the home of its Shelter Industries.

(CERI) concerning the broad economic impact of the industry.

“Those studies have consistently shown that not only do you have the direct local jobs, as well as the jobs coming across provincial borders,” he said.

“There’s also a huge impact on places like Ontario and the manufacturing centre there. Because somebody’s making that iron that we’re using. Somebody’s shipping that steel.

“So, there are numbers from a study

by CERI that was just updated,” he continued, “that show that impact of the industry. Not just the B.C. industry, but the overall oil and gas industry in all three western provinces and the overall Canadian economy.”

Of course, oil and gas is not the only item on the economic development agenda.

“Tourism is also a priority for the NPEDC,” said Davies, echoing the Northern Rockies Regional Municipality and their view of the regional importance of that sector of the economy.

“The NPEDC funded a study which was released [in] October, 2009 that showed annual visitor spending contributed approximately $73,170,000 to the local economy with an estimated 223,300 visitors traveling through the region from January, 2007 to December, 2007.”

Considering that natural spaces and local wildlife are primary tourist attractions for the region, the challenge is balancing oil and gas development with preserving those sights and scenes that lure visitors to the Northeast. It is a concern that Coad mentions in terms of “product quality.”

“You’ve got so many businesses, especially in remote areas, that are seasonal,” he said. “One of the challenges that tourism faces in those businesses is

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community

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- Horn River Basin Producers Group

james waterman Pipeline News North

A handful of the major oil and gas players in the Horn River Basin shale gas play of northeast British Columbia have been working together for the good of the community and the industry in that region since November of 2007.

Dubbed the Horn River Basin Producers Group, this coalition of energy companies was initially brought together to give the local residents of the Fort Nelson area a way to essentially speak to the industry in the region as a whole, ask their questions and voice their concerns, and subsequently have those questions and concerns addressed by a significant segment of the Horn River Basin oil and gas producers in an efficient and coordinated fashion, all at one time and place. The approach lets the people of Fort Nelson get a sense of the direction of development in the region, which would be difficult to do if they could only talk to one company at a time.

“From a communications standpoint, I think it makes a lot more sense to have a group where we share kind of a common vision and communicate that,” said Rob Spitzer, Chair of the Horn River Basin Producers Group and Vice President of Exploration for Apache Canada, one of its member companies.

Spitzer notes that the initiative is particularly important to the Fort Nelson First Nation, who had been promoting such an idea prior to the inception of the Producers Group. He also understands that the Fort Nelson First Nation should want to speak with a representative segment of the local producers rather than talk to every company in the region individually in order to discuss their unique cultural, environmental and economic concerns – owing partly to their traditional connection to the land and its wildlife – about how the resource is developed.

It has also given the Producers Group an opportunity to experience and support a taste of First Nations lifestyle and culture.

“As a Producers Group, a number of companies and myself [have] been up to the Petitot Gathering on an annual basis,” said Spitzer.

The Petitot Gathering is an annual First Nations and community event in the northeast that offers opportunities to learn about the different cultures in our region.

“It’s a really great event,” Spitzer continued. “We sponsor some of it, obviously. We send people up there … and this is very important.”

“It’s different when you go up there to see the attachment to the land,” he added. “This is something that I think everybody should see, because it will make you keenly aware of the thought processes that they go through. And there’s certainly things we can do to accommodate those things. So, I think it’s a great event.”

However, the Producers Group’s mandate is not solely to interact with the Fort Nelson First Nation, but

The Producers Group participates in the Petitot Gathering, a local cross-cultural event held every year.

Photo courtesy of Apache Canada

also to interact with the rest of the Fort Nelson community. One of their key concerns is increasing local employment in the industry and they have participated in various events and initiatives in order to achieve that goal.

“One of the reasons that the Producers Group was set up was basically to work with government and local residents and make sure that [we] understand the concerns that are in the community,” Spitzer explained.

“There’s a couple things that came up loud and clear,” he continued. “One was the local employment. That was a big one.”

One of the Group’s attempts to rectify the local employment problem – historically characterized by the short winter season on the muskeg and the plethora of Alberta license plates on Fort Nelson streets – is to hold an annual Fort Nelson Energy Expo.

“What it is,” said Spitzer, “is basically to get the companies working up in the Horn – and that includes the oil and gas companies and the service sector – together with the locals to discuss employment opportunities.

continued pg 19

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It’s been a good avenue by which that contact is made so that, basically, the local people who have interest in working in the sector can talk face-to-face with either … an oil and gas company rep or a service rep.”

The members of the Producers Group are among those companies making a concerted effort to hire from within the Fort Nelson community. They funded a onetime delivery of Northern Lights College’s Oil and Gas Field Operators program at the Fort Nelson campus in order to provide local residents with that opportunity.

That offering of the program ran from September, 2009 to January, 2010 and had an enrollment of sixteen students.

“I believe it was over-subscribed,” said Spitzer, discussing the community’s enthusiastic reaction to the program.

“It was in response to the fact that we do feel that we have some obligation to do some work in the community,” he continued.

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February 2011 I pipeline news north •

19

cont’d from pg 18

Rob Spitzer, Chair of the Horn River Basin Producers Group and Vice President of Exploration for Apache Canada, takes the far end of the rope in a tug-of-war at the annual Petitot Gathering in August, 2008.

Photo courtesy of Apache Canada

companies has been beneficial to the industry in the region as well.

“For smaller companies,” said Spitzer, “it helps them get through things that they might have difficulty with otherwise, because they don’t have enough people.”

“And I guess the main thing I’m getting at specifically is this: if company X wants to build a road and company Y is next door to them and are also thinking of building a road, wouldn’t it be great if company X and company Y have an avenue by which they build one road and share that road? So, I think one of the biggest advantages to all this is being the integration of what companies do.”

An important result of that integration has been minimizing surface disturbance, which is a significant issue in terms of its effect on predator-prey relationships and the decline of the caribou population in the region. Surface disturbance from projects such as building roads and pipelines can create long sight lines that make it easier for wolves to prey on deer, moose and caribou.

“One of the concerns was that there’s a predator-prey relationship that is a big issue if you shoot seismic lines in a straight fashion,” Spitzer explained. “Because, you know, the wolf can see the caribou or the deer or the moose a mile way … just looking down the cut line.”

“Certain companies were utilizing a meandering line type of way of shooting seismic,” he continued. “It’s called slim bin seismic. Fundamentally, if you use your cut lines and have them meander, versus being straight, then that predator-prey relationship is … more intact and

more natural than it would have been by having seismic lines like you’d see at some of the northern fields that were developed thirty, forty years ago. And this is something that we said, ‘Well, alright, why don’t we all commit to shooting slim bin seismic?’ And that’s what we have committed to. But it wouldn’t have happened, I don’t think, without this kind of discussion.”

The Producers Group was originally comprised of Apache Canada, Devon Canada, Encana, EOG Resources Canada, Imperial Oil/ExxonMobil Canada, Nexen, Quicksilver Resources and Stone Mountain. It now also includes ConocoPhillips and Pengrowth.

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“And the thought was that we would target young people who would like to get trained up to work in the industry. And at that time the understanding was that it was only offered in Fort St. John, which is … a five hour drive from Fort Nelson. And our thought was to make it local to Fort Nelson since most of the Horn River activity is actually somewhat focused on, obviously, the town of Fort Nelson.”

So, the Producers Group discussed the idea with Jeff Lekstrom, the Dean of Trades and Apprenticeship at Northern Lights College, and managed to bring the program to Fort Nelson for one session.

“There may be an opportunity to run it again if the need arises, but at this point we have no plans for it,” Spitzer added. “But if there was a demand, we’d certainly consider it again.”

Opportunities to work with Northern Lights College on bringing other programs to Fort Nelson may arise in the future, especially if projections concerning population growth and the need for skilled labour in the region hold true, but Spitzer and the Producers Group are understandably cautious on that point.

“There’s certainly things that we can look into,” he admitted cautiously. “To be honest, right now … all this stuff that you hear about, it’s really [greatly] contingent on natural gas prices. So, I don’t want to mislead anybody here. I know there’s people that think it’s going to double or triple or be Fort McMurray, but the reality is … that fundamentally the price of gas is going to be a big regulator as to how quickly that moves forward.”

Another variable is the feasibility of exporting their products to Asia in the near future.

“And that won’t sort itself out for a little while,” said Spitzer. “The timeframe on that is certainly not in the next few months. It’s measured in years.”

One thing that is certain is that the people of Fort Nelson will not be left in the dark as to what the industry is doing in their backyard. Communicating with stakeholders is always an important focus for the Producers Group. They hold meetings on a monthly basis and invite Mayor Bill Streeper of the Northern Rockies Regional Municipality and members of his staff, the Fort Nelson First Nation, and the provincial government to participate via teleconference. There are also annual meetings between the Producers Group and the Fort Nelson Chamber of Commerce.

“From a Producers Group standpoint, because there’s ten companies involved, there’s people from one company or other up there all the time, just as a course of business,” said Spitzer, describing just how easy it can be to speak with the Producers Group.

“If there’s something that comes up that is of concern to another party then, sure, we would make a phone call and have a conversation,” he added, noting that he frequently receives telephone calls about issues ranging from local employment to the environment and he feels it is important to address those concerns.

“There’s always an avenue of communication.”

Spitzer also emphasizes the importance of establishing an “early dialogue.”

“There’s no point doing this halfway through a large project,” he said. “It gets very difficult. It’s very good to do it early. And it’s also important that you get all the stakeholders and the First Nations engaged.”

“I’m not going to paint the picture that it’s perfect,” he continued. “But, I think, in good conscience, I can say it’s much better than it would have been without having such a group.”

The fact that the Producers Group has also facilitated communication and cooperation between the member

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20 • PIPELINE NEWS NORTH I February 2011

special feature caribou, caribou

- Part 1: what is creating the problem? james waterman Pipeline News North

Lana Lowe, Lands Director for the Fort Nelson First Nation, is all too aware of the challenges facing the caribou of northeast British Columbia.

It is an issue that not only plays a prominent role among the great environmental concerns of the day, but how the problem is addressed could also have a substantial impact on the traditional lifestyle of her community, and possibly write the last chapter of an important part of their cultural heritage as a people who have hunted elk, bison, moose and caribou for centuries.

The challenge facing the provincial government is that caribou habitat in northern B.C. sits atop a vast supply of natural gas and other petroleum products. The wealth of the resource can mean new jobs in the energy sector, an increase in business for service sector companies, and royalty revenues for the province, just to name a few of the most obvious economic benefits.

The trouble is balancing the desire to take advantage of those opportunities and the need to protect our remaining caribou. After all, people and caribou are essentially trying to make their living off the same piece of land.

The Province and the Fort Nelson First Nation are on the same page in some respects. They both recognize that caribou is a species in need of protection. They both recognize that natural gas development in caribou habitat in the Horn River Basin offers great economic benefits for the larger Fort Nelson community and B.C. as a whole. However, an antagonism exists between the two parties, recently exemplified by the battle between the West Moberly First Nations and the provincial government over the proposed coalmine in the winter range of the Burnt Pine caribou herd near Chetwynd. The site had been designated by the Ministry of Forestry as an area that is not to be disturbed by logging companies. Still, a permit was issued to First Coal for a mining operation by the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources at that time.

That is precisely the sort of problem that the new Ministry of Natural Resource Operations (NRO) may be able to solve.

The potential exists within the structure of the NRO to work more effectively with energy companies and other resource industries to eliminate these kinds of incidents, as the new ministry is concerned with the natural resource sector as a whole, as well as the environment in which those companies do their work.

However, critics of the NRO suggest that it is primarily a tool for fast-tracking applications through the regulatory machinery at the expense of the environment.

Chris Ritchie, Manager of Species at Risk Recovery Implementation with the NRO, insists that is not the case.

“I think if you talk to any of the senior folks, part of the reason for this reorganization in the government was to enable a more efficient and effective processing of government’s work, especially in the natural resources sector,” he said. “I

don’t think that … will likely cut through red tape or allow the process to move more quickly. I don’t think that the pace of development in and of itself is the problem as long as there are appropriate safeguards to think about the social implications, to think about … the environmental implications. And so if the pace is hastened or made easier, like less administrative as a result of the change in government, we still have the same safeguards in terms of environmental protection and what have you. I don’t necessarily think we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater.”

However, Lowe believes that the pace of development is exactly the problem, particularly in how it adversely affects the predator-prey dynamics in that ecosystem.

“The issue is linear disturbance, right?” she said. “I mean, creating these roads and these pipelines and these seismic lines that make it easier for the wolves to get the calves: that’s the issue.”

Ritchie does agree on that count.

“The best science or technical insight that we have is that the long term issue is about habitat fragmentation, largely due to industrial activities,” he said. “And in the northeast, the dominant factor is the oil and gas sector and linear developments, whether they’re pipelines or roads or seismic programs. And then some of the footprint-y stuff like well pads and that kind of infrastructure. The proximal issue probably that’s wove in there is predation by wolves. The efficiency of wolves is improved with some of those linear features – sight lines, travel corridors, and what have you. And so the strategy of the caribou is to try and space out at fairly low numbers so the chance of encounter with a predator such as a wolf is low. And when a wolf can peer quite a bit farther into the bush, because there’s a cut line or something, it just reduces the effectiveness of the caribou’s antipredator strategy.”

Part of the problem is also the fact that caribou cows will often flee from predators rather than protect their calves as moose cows tend to do.

“Those linear developments don’t kill caribou,” Ritchie continued. “It’s the wolves that do. But the wolf predation is enabled or improved by the linear features. So, it’s kind of hard to separate the two.”

“If I had my way, there would be paced development,” said Lowe. “Right now, the rush is on. It’s slowed down quite a bit this year because of gas prices, but there are … plans for aggressive development in our territory, which overlaps with the boreal caribou habitat in B.C. And within five years, the roads, the pipelines, the waterlines, the seismic lines, they’re all going to be cut.”

Lowe feels that staggering or moderating the pace of development would reduce the number of paths and sight lines available to wolves, while allowing the restoration of disturbed sites before development starts in other locations.

Her biggest concern along the lines of surface disturbance are the plans for extensive 3D seismic work in the Horn River Basin that the Horn River Basin Producers Group announced to the Fort Nelson First Nation in 2009. Lowe was told at that time that they intended to do

media archive photo

3D seismic throughout the entirety of the basin within the subsequent five years.

“So, the grid will cover the whole thing,” she said. “But they’re going to use low impact seismic, which is not as bad as the bad old days.”

Still, she has significant concerns about the project.

“The research is showing that there’s no difference between the disturbance in the first year – the impact on caribou in the first year – between high impact and low impact, because the disturbance is there, the line of sight’s still there. It doesn’t grow in. Like the old seismic still hasn’t grown in and that was forty years ago. The new seismic grows in within two, three years, but that first year, it’s the same, and that’s when all the killing is happening. Then the impact’s the same.”

According to Ritchie, low impact seismic is one of the industry initiatives that the NRO is strongly endorsing.

“Rather than cutting long, die-straight lines across the landscape,” he explained, “you weave the line through the forest, trying to avoid the need to cut down trees and disturb the vegetation. And get the same seismic effect and benefit, and a much lighter impact.”

“And we’re hoping that through a pretty aggressive and quick restoration program that we can jumpstart the recovery

of those lines more quickly. That, again, doesn’t instantly change the condition of the line, and there will be some residual, I guess, benefit to wolves or problem for caribou. But hopefully we’ll reduce the duration of that benefit to wolves.”

“And one of the challenges is,” Ritchie continued, “if that cut line is about improving the visual effectiveness of a wolf predator, can we just grow some alder or some shrubs in there and that blocks the view? Or do we really need the original sort of conifer – spruce or whatever the tree was there?

“We don’t know that yet. But we need to answer that question and then do it. And then finally we need to manage the predator-prey dynamic. And so it’s primarily wolves as the predator. The alternate prey may be moose or beaver or something else. And so the simple model is that, as there is more opening, the recovering vegetation is better forage for things like moose. That allows the moose numbers to increase.

“The wolves are really, we think, more dependent on moose biomass to keep their populations up than caribou. And so if we can manage moose to low numbers, then the wolves will stay low. And we can also manage wolf numbers directly – trapping them, hunting them, what have you.” continued pg 22

February 2011 I pipeline news north •

21

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22 • PIPELINE NEWS NORTH I February 2011

Caribou Part 1: - what is creating the problem?

media archive photo

cont’d from pg 20

28398

Lowe feels that people, such as those in government and industry, are too quick to shift blame to the wolf instead of focusing on how to change their own behavior to reduce the disturbance that is the crux of the problem. She points to the prospect of a wolf cull as a perfect example of that attitude.

“That’s their preferred approach … because that doesn’t require slow down to industry,” she said.

Ritchie admits that a wolf cull is a possibility.

“Wolf predation is … the proximal cause of the decline of boreal caribou,” he explained. “And, in fact, caribou throughout British Columbia have a problem with wolf predation. We have tried a variety of methods, including in the northeast, to trap, to encourage trappers to focus on wolves, to relax hunting restrictions so that there’s not an impediment to non-aboriginal hunters as well as aboriginal hunters. In some situations, we think we may need to remove wolves much more dramatically than we’re able

to using trapping or hunting. In Alberta, they have a pretty massive program of shooting wolves from helicopters and the use of poison.

“I’m pretty sure British Columbia’s not going to use poison … We have not been approved to remove wolves by shooting from helicopters, although we have asked for authority to do that under certain conditions.”

“There are cultural issues with a mass cull of wolves,” said Lowe. “Of course, obviously, we’re not against hunting animals. That’s how we survive. And there would still be a market for fur from wolves. We don’t eat wolves, but we would use the fur.”

“I just think that we have to be more creative,” she added. “And, I guess, compromising when it comes to solutions to this. Because killing wolves and blaming wolves for a problem that’s created by humans, I don’t think that’s ethical, and I don’t think it’s a moral approach.”

An emerging disagreement between the Fort Nelson First Nation and the pro-

vincial government revolves around one NRO initiative: a Resource Review Area (RRA) of land in the Horn River Basin that will be free from tenure disposition for five years.

“As part of the implementation plan, or the direction from cabinet,” said Ritchie, “areas that were identified, right now, as currently untenured for oil and gas and were within caribou ranges – they were specifically focused on caribou – were put into or given a designation of a Resource Review Area. And that designation means that for five years they will be deferred from disposition of oil and gas tenures. And at the end of that five years, we’ll look and see how things are going.”

The total area of the RRA land is approximately 550,000 hectares. Caribou range in the region covers approximately 3,991,000 hectares and the section of that range known as core habitat is approximately 2,280,000 hectares. About six percent of the range and fourteen percent of the core habitat is now within the RRA. However, Lowe’s concern is that the RRA has already proven itself to be ineffectual.

“A series of gravel pit applications came through our office and they were within the RRA,” she explained. “We tried to use the RRA to stop the gravel pits from going in, but because it only applies to tenure sales, it didn’t matter that it was an RRA. The development still happens even though the tenure’s not being sold.”

“They need the gravel pits for road building,” she concluded, referring to the oil and gas industry. “So, they’re not drilling in the area, but they’re still developing it to support the industry.”

Ritchie was unable to dispute that claim outright.

“It’s possible,” he admitted, responding to Lowe’s allegations, “but I know that there are a couple of applications that came in subsequent to the RRA being established. I know they are being

delayed until we get our act together. So, this issue of ensuring that all the activities in there are complementary, so that we don’t put a constraint on oil and gas tenuring and then, by not having a similar constraint on somebody else, you sort of undo the benefit. So, the original cabinet direction wasn’t detailed enough to catch all that stuff. So, we are trying to deal with that right now. But the applications that have come in subsequent to the RRA being established have not been approved.”

“We now recognize that as an issue … and we’re trying to address it.”

If the Province and the Fort Nelson First Nation agree on anything, it is that action must be taken to protect the caribou and their habitat.

The Maxhamish caribou herd is the only caribou herd in the province that is reasonably stable at the present time, according to Ritchie. As is the case with the boreal caribou population across Canada, the other five B.C. herds are in decline.

The total caribou population in B.C. is only 1300 to 1500 individuals. The Burnt Pine caribou herd may be as small as just eleven individuals.

“Across Canada and in B.C. these critters are in decline,” Ritchie concluded, noting that the NRO is considering threshold limits for the amount of industry activity caribou habitat can tolerate. “So, what can we do now to try and reduce that decline and in the long-term, perhaps, have a recovery of those herds to levels that they are now or they might have been historically?”

“It’s about balance, right?” said Lowe.

“It’s about a level of development that’s responsible, that doesn’t destroy everything that means something to people around here, just to get oil and gas out of the ground.”

“I think they have to alter their plans.

They can’t do development at the pace they’re doing. The caribou won’t survive.”

February 2011 I pipeline news north •

special feature caribou, caribou

23

- Part 2: what is industry doing to help?

james waterman Pipeline News North

As long as Shad Watts can remember, the issue of British Columbia’s declining caribou population has been on the radar of the oil and gas industry.

Now that he is the head of the environment committee of the Horn River Basin Producers Group – as well as Director of Community Consultation and Regulatory Affairs with Nexen – it is also an issue that is constantly on his mind. After all, protecting caribou and their habitat is possibly the biggest environmental concern in the area where Producers Group member companies are currently exploring and developing shale gas resources.

The big concern for the Producers Group is that surface disturbance caused by their exploration and development activities is contributing to the decline of caribou populations through wolf predation. Particularly, access roads, pipelines and seismic lines create paths that wolves like to travel and long sight lines that make it easier for the predators to spot their prey.

The question for the Producers Group is how to rectify the problem.

“Disturbance in and of itself does not really impact caribou,” Watts explained, noting that caribou can continue to live in the vicinity of forestry and oil and gas operations as long as the available food is sufficient.

“What’s happening,” he continued, “is that habitat change on a broad scale is leading to altered predator-prey dynamics on the landscape. And that’s what’s driving caribou decline. So, it’s the creation of more alternate prey species, like moose and deer, and that’s partly due to changes on the landscape in terms of more early seral stages.”

Early seral species are plants that begin to grow shortly after surface disturbance and attract herbivores such as deer and moose that feed on those plants. It is thought that those deer and moose, primary prey species for wolves, subsequently attract predators into the area, increasing the incidence of predation on caribou. Watts also points to the potential link between climate change and wolf predation, noting that deer populations are gradually moving northward, 29437

possibly due to rising temperatures in their habitats farther south, and attracting predators such as wolves and bears into caribou territory.

“Caribou aren’t dying because they don’t have enough to eat,” said Watts.

“Caribou are dying because they’re getting eaten.”

The Producers Group is attempting to address the problem by limiting the creation of those early seral stages that attract deer and moose.

“We don’t protect for caribou, right?” said Watts. “Caribou are a provincially managed species. So, what we do is we manage our activity for caribou. So, we’re looking to minimize our footprint.”

Watts explains that they are also examining how they can reduce “predator permeability” into caribou habitat by blocking sight lines and pathways used by wolves. The industry has considered a variety of line blocking techniques, including temporary fences, shrubs, and felling trees across cut lines, but many of these techniques cause other issues.

“The problem is that there’s regulations that prevents some of that as well,” said Watts. “So, you’ve got fire control issues with slash, fallen trees, or brush pilings. So, it’s not as simple as just thinking, ‘Oh, this is a good idea. Let’s try it.’”

Another challenge facing the Producers Group as representatives of the industry in the region is the public perception, particularly among environmental and First Nations groups, that the industry only does as much as government demands, and that often is not enough to solve the problem.

“I think we’re working with government,” said Watts. “We recognize the importance of caribou. It’s both a provincially and federally listed species. So, government owns wildlife management for the province. We wouldn’t ever want to run out too far in front of that. But, that said, we also have to manage our risk as companies. So, we are proactively looking to mitigate the impact of our activity on caribou. And that’s through thorough understanding of all the research or developing new research questions as they arise. And then enabling that research to occur.”

It has been suggested that the new

Ministry of Natural Resource Operations (NRO) could allow the provincial government to play a bigger role in managing how industry operates in sensitive habitats, as it includes elements formerly belonging to all the natural resource and environment ministries. The thought is that the NRO can facilitate cooperation between the various resource industries working in the habitats of threatened species in order to reduce surface disturbance and other causes of environmental degradation. However, the Producers Group is still uncertain as to how the new ministry and the resource industries will work together on those issues.

“We’re regulated by the Oil and Gas Commission,” said Watts. “The Oil and Gas Commission now reports into the NRO – or is housed under the NRO – but as a separate entity within the NRO. I would think, and hope, that in being part of kind of the regulatory delivery body that the NRO is – or the implementation body – that there would be opportunity for synergy

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between industries and regulators. But, again, we’ll have to see how that gets implemented.”

The Producers Group is already doing its best to encourage collaboration between the oil and gas industry players in the Horn River Basin, including cooperation on the caribou issue, and promote those initiatives to the Province.

“What we’ve done so far is we’ve come together and we’ve created what we call the Area Operating Protocols,” Watts explained. “So, that’s a suite of best management practices that go above and beyond regulatory requirements. And so what we did is we picked a few key values and we looked to address them through the protocols, one of them being caribou. So, companies have adopted those protocols and we’ve passed them on to government and said, ‘You know, we’re only a small portion of the players on the landscape. There’s other companies within the Basin. We would encourage you to adopt these through, say, an Information Letter – or an IL – and make them a requirement for the Basin.’ So, the government’s considering those.”

The Producers Group has also entered into a partnership with the provincial government to conduct a study to examine current moose populations in the region and add that data to historical data from previous moose monitoring initiatives.

continued pg 24

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Caribou Part 2: - what is industry doing to help? cont’d from pg 23

“As part of our collaborative initiative, we have what’s called an infrastructure coordination process,” Watts continued. “And we produce a map. And it’s a one to two year map. And we update it quarterly. And what it does is everybody sits around the table and we plunk our infrastructure down for the next year. And that enables us, as a group, to say, ‘Well, here’s an opportunity for me to coordinate with you.’ And we’ve developed a set of guidelines as to how we do that as a group internally.”

Satisfying the concerns of local First Nations communities is not as easy.

The Producers Group has an aboriginal relations subcommittee that reports to the steering committee, a collection of executives from all its member companies. That steering committee is the main point of contact between the Producers Group and the Fort Nelson First Nation and Fort Liard’s Acho Dene Koe. The First Nations are invited to participate in the steering committee’s monthly meetings via teleconference.

Although the Producers Group does hear the concerns of the First Nations through those bodies, it is not always possible to act as the First Nations would want industry to act, particularly when their request is staggering or moderating the pace of development so as to reduce the stress on caribou and their habitat.

Initiatives of that type would not be fair to all companies working in the Horn River Basin, as their operations are all located at different points throughout the region. It would amount to telling certain companies that they cannot work while other companies would still be free continue their activities.

“For forestry,” Watts explained, “it’s easy to do that. The resource is known.

You can inventory it. You can understand its distribution across the landscape. Oil and gas, you can’t.”

“For us to even delineate the resource,” he continued, “we have to go in there and build a road and build a pad and all the rest of it. I think what we do is we mitigate our impacts and hopefully down to the point where they’re no longer influencing the pathways for decline. So, if you look at, say, something like low impact seismic. The question is: when is a line no longer a line and has no impact on caribou?

And there’s been a

bunch of research done in northern B.C. that shows that there is a point where lines no longer have an impact.”

However, the Producers Group is not alone in trying to address the caribou issue. The oil and gas industry on a broad scale is also attempting to do its part in ensuring the survival of caribou in northeast B.C. through Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) and Science Community and Environmental Knowledge Fund (SCEK) initiatives.

“When it comes to caribou, our view is we really need to have clear caribou policy to understand how to conduct our activities in places where caribou live, like in the Northeast,” said Sherry Syan, Manager of Resource Access with CAPP. CAPP has a Species Management Committee consisting of members with technical expertise in wildlife management that meets to discuss those types of concerns as well as new policy and regulations and industry activity as they relate to species management.

“So,” Syan continued, “a lot of the discussion that happens around the Species Management Committee centers on different initiatives that may inform that, or actually be proactive efforts in terms of industry stewardship in that regard. And so that can take a number of forms.

Sometimes, it’s just the active engaging or contributing to the policy discussion, and what a workable management plan looks like and what the components need to be.

And so in Alberta we’ve got the Endangered Species Conservation Committee.

But in B.C. I would say it’s fairly early days and we’re just getting into discussions about what management plans might look like and what our role in terms of delivering them might be.”

The efforts of the Species Management Committee might help the industry shake the perception that they only do as much as government demands of them when dealing with issues such as protecting threatened or endangered species.

“Our view is there are a lot of things that industry is actually doing proactively to contribute to caribou management,” said Syan. “And it’s not strictly through those regulatory vehicles. There are

initiatives that focus on integrated land management and coordinated access, where companies are getting together and discussing how to minimize new footprint creation that’s part of the oil and gas activities. So, that’s one type of thing that we’re doing.”

Recently, CAPP is becoming more involved in research initiatives with the focus being mitigating the impacts of industry activity on wildlife and their habitats. Due to its presence on the SCEK steering committee – along with the BC Oil and Gas Commission and the Small Explorers and Producers Association of Canada (SEPAC) – CAPP is now also participating in a new SCEK study concentrating on caribou calf survivorship in northeast B.C. “They’re such a critical part in terms of maintaining population,” Syan explained, referring to caribou calves and the importance of recruitment to ensuring the long-term survival of the B.C. caribou herds. “And they tend to be the most vulnerable when we talk about looking at predator-prey relationships.”

The study, which is being conducted by researchers from the University of Alberta, is a four-year project involving three years of data collection that will begin with attaching radio collars to caribou at the end of February, 2011 and monitoring the animals for a period from early May until the middle of July. The second year of the study will involve collaring and monitoring black bears and wolves during the same timeframe.

The third year consists of replacing collars lost due to mortality during the previous seasons and again monitoring the animals from May through July, 2013.

The fourth year of the study is simply analyzing the results and writing reports.

“What they want to find out is where do caribou go when they’re having their babies,” said Brian Thompson, SCEK Program Manager.

The important timeframe

in terms of caribou calf survival and predation is their first six weeks. The project will attempt to determine locations where calves are experiencing the best survival rates during that period and where predators are having the greatest success in terms of preying on caribou during breeding season.

Although the oil and gas industry already pays into the SCEK fund on a regular basis, the SCEK funding allocated to this project has also been matched by a contribution from ten energy sector companies, led by Nexen.

That is just one of the reasons why Thompson is enthusiastic about the project.

“What we’re excited about is it seems to be a solid theory to look at why aren’t they surviving,” he said. “We have ten companies – industry companies – that are quite keen to throw in their own support for this. So, that means there’s quite a bit of interest out there and they think it’s important information to know.”

Thompson is also excited about government involvement in the project, noting that the provincial Ministry of Environment is offering their help in terms of collaring animals and other fieldwork.

The steering committee and the peer review group will also feature representatives from government.

“What we’re trying to figure out is how far do the researchers go and where do we pick up in terms of best management practices,” said Thompson, discussing how industry might apply the results of the study. “We can’t expect the researcher to tell us what [are] best management practices for operating in the area, but they can definitely say, ‘Caribou like these kinds of areas. They seem to survive in this type of vegetation and this type of topography.’ And then we’ll work with them then to say, ‘Well, here’s our best management practices for helping ensure caribou survival.’”

photo courtesy of BC Ministry of forests

February 2011 I pipeline news north •

technology

25

catching fugitives - infrared provides new sight into leaks

james waterman Pipeline News North

Over the past few years, ConocoPhillips has received recognition from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) for their innovative use of infrared cameras in managing fugitive emissions at their facilities.

Now the use of that technology for detecting and repairing small gas leaks is becoming common in western Canada due to Alberta legislation – law as of January 1, 2010 – demanding that “operators must develop and implement a program to detect and repair leaks.”

“In the past,” said Paul Slobodnik, Team Lead for Operational Energy Efficiency at ConocoPhillips, “there were pretty limited ways you could actually look for these leaks. You could kind of use, more or less, soap at the connections and watch the bubbles. So, this technology basically lets you take what looks like a video camera and film your way through these connections and actually see gas leaks. They basically show up as clouds on the video screen.”

Slobodnik explained that the development of that process all began with a few individuals in their Health, Safety and Environment group who had discovered the technology, recognized its potential for the upstream oil and gas industry, and subsequently received approval to purchase one of the infrared cameras.

“Because, at that time, there weren’t even service providers that provided the service,” he added.

The company conducted a test run of approximately twenty to thirty facilities, ultimately finding that it was effective enough to implement on a much larger scale throughout their operations. ConocoPhillips now uses the technology as part of a fugitive emissions component of a routine maintenance program that is conducted during the regularly scheduled shutdown of any one of their facilities.

“We’re still working with industry to actually learn more about it,” Slobodnik said of the technology. “But, in general, it’s been pretty successful in terms of at least highlighting the need for taking care of our operations so we don’t have any fugitive emissions, any leaks.”

ConocoPhillips no longer has any trouble finding a service provider to supply the infrared cameras necessary to perform their fugitive emissions program.

“I couldn’t even tell you how many service providers,” said Slobodnik.

“There are two or three services providers that we deal with, but there’s probably half a dozen, if not a dozen, in western Canada.”

One of thE service providers that ConocoPhillips contracts on a regular basis is Infratech Corporation, an operation based in Whitecourt, Alberta that offers a number of industry applications for infrared technology, including managing fugitive emissions.

“We were the first contractor in Canada to purchase the equipment and use it commercially in 2006,” said Dan Guenette, Vice President of Infratech, noting that the infrared cameras that they use have only been available since 2005.

“It was new to the upstream industry,” Guenette continued.

“Downstream, at the refinery, they had been doing it for years – doing fugitive emission detection for years.

So, the upstream side of the industry, which is the facilities and those kinds of things out in the field, they’ve just been doing it for the past couple of years.”

According to Slobodnik, the benefits of using this new infrared technology to manage fugitive emissions are essentially a matter of the cumulative economic and environmental effect of lost product, particularly greenhouse gases.

“Economically, whenever you lose product, it’s always a concern,” said Slobodnik, noting that the amount of lost product is actually fairly low.

“The gas that we process is a lot of methane,” he added. “And so methane is a greenhouse gas. So, if it would leak – you know, we definitely don’t want it leaking.”

Certainly, the industry feels this method is worthwhile, especially

A ConocoPhillips employee checks for small gas leaks during routine maintenance at one of their facilities. The infrared camera can detect leaks that are invisible to the naked eye.

Photo courtesy of ConocoPhillips Canada

considering the recognition from CAPP. “The Canadian industry is improving environmental, social and safety performance and we need to recognize leading results like those achieved by ConocoPhillips as they happen, reinforcing an overarching culture of continuous improvement,” said CAPP spokesperson Travis Davies.

“The recognition was for bringing [in] this new technology that wasn’t used by anybody,” said Slobodnik. “I’m not sure how many cameras there even were in Canada at the time.

And really taking pioneering efforts down that path to look for a better way to find leaks.”

However, ConocoPhillips is not yet satisfied with their approach to managing fugitive emissions.

“The first technology that we used is the infrared cameras,” Slobodnik explained.

“But really we use a range of technologies, everything from the hand held monitors to some new equipment we’ve got, that we bought for compressors, that actually listen

for leaks acoustically. Because, when you have a leak, sometimes the sound is a higher frequency than you’d hear. And we’ve even, just recently, had some helicopter surveys done. So, these guys have similar technology to this infrared camera that they hang below a helicopter, and we’ve started doing some pipelines. Some of those things are still preliminary. We’re not really sure how the results are going to work out, but it’s just an increased focus on making sure our operations emit as little as possible.”

“There’s three of us that basically work on energy efficiency, emissions reduction, new technologies,” he continued, discussing his Operational Energy Efficiency group. “We’re looking at ways to improve our operations.

“So, it’s been pretty well supported by management and there are a lot of things that we’re evaluating. It’s a big industry that operates in a challenging environment. So, we think there [are] some improvements that we can make.”

28392

www.trojansafety.com

26 • PIPELINE NEWS NORTH I February 2011

Gwyn Morgan - a road to the Order of Canada cont’d from pg 9

Morgan really began to show the strength of an organization with a sharper focus in 2002 when the merger of Alberta Energy and PanCanadian Energy finally created Encana. Not only had he divested the company of its other businesses, but he had also gone from “being the guy that drilled the first well” for Alberta Energy to the man who had built that upstart oil and gas division into an outfit that was big and strong enough to rival any of the largest energy companies in the world.

It was also a moment when his unique leadership skills truly shone.

“A merger of that magnitude – two large companies – is something that gives angst to just about everybody in terms of where are they in the overall picture,” said Wilson. “And he quickly recognized that. So, he issued emails, and I would say virtually daily. I mean, there may have been one or two days when he [was] out, like down in New York with the analysts and things like that.

But he would report back on those meetings as soon as he got back. And the funny thing was we still had – because the merger had not been completed legally – we still had to run two companies, right? And so there were two different IT systems. And so everything had to be replicated so that his message went out to all employees at the same time. I mean, he was that sensitive to it.”

It was just one aspect of an overall approach to leadership that Morgan had developed working with Mitchell early in his career with Alberta Energy.

“As a leader, he had a way of giving you responsibility,” said Morgan, discussing the management style of his former mentor. “And it wasn’t very often that Dave would say, ‘You got to do this or you got to do that.’ He would give you advice. He’d have you think about it.

But most of the time you knew it was your show and your responsibility. And I learned that from Dave. Because that’s a great, empowering thing.”

Wilson has similar memories of Morgan from when he was hired to join the public affairs department at Alberta Energy.

“He said to me at the time, ‘I don’t like surprises. So, keep me posted. But you’re running the public affairs. Not me.’”

“He recognizes the skills and talents of people,” Wilson continued. “But, more importantly, he allows you to do your job without hovering. He expected you to do your job without hovering.”

According to Wilson, even if Morgan did not expect his staff to always need his input, he did expect his staff to offer their opinion. He recalls a specific occasion when they were producing the annual report. Facing a time crunch and plagued by an inability to make a choice on their own, Wilson and his team decided to let Morgan pick the design.

The CEO subsequently chose the one that Wilson had at the bottom of his list.

Wilson did not say a word until the report had already been published, and both of the men were sitting together at a fundraising dinner, thankful that the task was finished. Asked why he had not spoken up earlier, Wilson only remarked that he simply felt that it was his job to produce the report that Morgan had chosen.

“He said, ‘Don’t you ever do that again,’” said Wilson. “He said, ‘I didn’t hire you to be a yes-man. I hired you because I value your opinion. I might not have to agree with your opinion, but I

value it. You did a disservice to me and you did a disservice to yourself.’ And he said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ And he said, ‘Now pass the bread.’”

“But that’s the way the guy was in his leadership,” Wilson continued. “He said what he thought and that’s it. It’s done.”

“When he did the corporate constitution, he wrote it, drafted it, and then sent it to me,” he said, remembering another example of Morgan’s strength as a leader. “And I’d edit it and send it back. And he’d send the next one. And it’s a little longer than the first one. And so when he finally was comfortable with it, what he did is he had his assistant contact different employees at random and invited them to come to a meeting with Gwyn ten days hence. Didn’t say why. Met with them and had them read the constitution – the draft – and then give their spontaneous reaction to it.

And that gave him a glimpse of a crosssection of the employees. And I don’t know how many of those he did, but that was also his way of getting right to the audience in terms of the development of the message. It went through many, many more iterations, but then we had a significant launch of a corporate constitution, because that told employees: this is important. Never mind policy manuals that get thrown in desks and all the rest of it. This is what guides you. Period.”

“It was the only employee-corporate constitution that we know of in Canada,” Wilson concluded.

It was also evidence of a management style that Wilson claims was not strictly “top down.”

“In many respects, when the president had to make a decision, he made the decisions,” he explained. “Period. But in other respects: no. Because, again, he recognized the value of inclusion in terms of keeping employees informed and consulted when it affected them.”

Consequently, when Morgan did have to make an executive decision, it was a decision that reflected the sentiments of his employees as well, because they were all on the same page. Wilson insists that Morgan’s attitude and philosophy in that manner created a great culture and a “phenomenal” environment in which to work.

“I had the best PR job in the province of Alberta,” said Wilson. “Because of him and because of his predecessor Dave Mitchell.”

Indeed, Mitchell’s influence is quite visible in Morgan’s work as a leader in business, but also as a leader in philanthropy.

“The one thing maybe I learned from Dave more than anything else,” said Morgan, “is that no matter what one of your people who reports to you is doing, what the job is, what the project is, it’s not just getting the project done well.

Or getting the particular activity done well. It’s how do you make it so that that person learns the most from it. Always looking at how to develop. He never stopped thinking about how to develop his people. And I benefited from that greatly.”

Morgan has taken this lesson beyond developing the skills and talents of the people in his company to building the capacity of organizations and communities to which he and Encana have donated their philanthropic dollars.

“We supported virtually every community we operated in, and every community in every country we operated in, and we tried to make a difference in that regard,” said Morgan, noting that Alberta Energy was one of the first members of the Imagine Canada program through which corporations commit to donating

Gwyn Morgan explains EnCana’s Environmental Innovation Fund, which was established to advance new technologies and solutions that improve environmental performance associated with consuming and producing energy.

Photo credit Hélène Cyr, courtesy of Pearson College.

one percent of their pre-tax revenue to charity. “But the one fundamental premise that I believed in and which we used in our evaluation of donations and sponsorships … was capacity building. We didn’t believe in just giving money away. Just giving money away can in some ways just make people dependent. But if it can help them build capacity, in a learning sense or in some other sense, that was our big measure.”

“And that’s why a lot of our own personal donations focus on education,” he continued, discussing the foundation that he and his wife established after his retirement. “And not just sort of generally giving away to public education, but more in the sense of actually helping people – students – who have great potential, but otherwise couldn’t get there. That makes it harder work, because you have a lot more selection to do. And we do believe that building capacity, whether it be in education or other ways, is the best way you can use philanthropic dollars.”

That is the reason why Encana was so heavily involved in developing and funding oil and gas industry training programs at Northern Lights College, as well as contributing to constructing the Industry Training Centre at the school’s Fort St. John campus. As an early and dominant player in the region, Encana recognized that there were problems stemming from the seasonality of work in boggy areas of muskeg, the lack of industry employment opportunities for residents of the region, and the absence of training programs that would allow locals to join the oil and gas workforce. The programs at Northern Lights College were designed to help address those issues. Morgan attended the official launch of those programs and he was met with praise from the community for Encana’s commitment to promoting year-round industry activity and hiring locally in the region.

“I think the Northern Lights College thing is one of the best things we did,” he said, remembering the warm reception.

Now Morgan is living what he likes to call “Chapter Three” of his life.

“After all those years in the energy business and building a company,” he said, “I wanted to make a complete change. We also made a change in where we live, because we’ve always loved the west coast.

And so I made a specific decision not to involve myself anymore in energy.”

That is not to say that he is no longer involved in business, however. Since his retirement from the oil and gas industry, he accepted an invitation to join the board of HSBC, the largest bank in the world,

which has its headquarters in London, England. He is the first person from the Americas to assume that position. He is also on the board of one of the biggest engineering companies, SNC-Lavalin.

“I always considered myself sort of a citizen of the world and this is the time for me to be involved even more in that,” he explained.

Morgan describes the honour of joining the Order of Canada as a “wonderful thing.”

“When you live in a country that we’re as fortunate as we are to live in, and you love it as much as I do,” he added, further discussing the recognition, “it’s a very special thing.”

It is also the culmination of a career that Morgan does not speak of in terms of past achievements, but in terms of lessons learned along the way.

“Over the years,” he said, “what was probably most satisfying about my career was that I learned how important it was to build an esprit de corps – a team, a group of people, and a whole company that were passionate about what they did.

And that were absolutely proud of the organization they were working for and the leadership that they had.”

Through his experiences with Alberta Energy and Encana, he became a firm believer in the value of learning from mistakes and the power of the innovative creativity of people when they are given the right environment in which to exercise their talents.

Still, he always returns to integrity.

“The source of most dysfunction in the world is misalignment of values and goals and rewards,” said Morgan.

“If you don’t have the value system that guides them – it’s the moral compass – and if they’re not led in such a way that what they’re rewarded for is what you want to happen, then you’ll fail. And that’s why in most countries and in many businesses and in many walks of life, including government, there is a lot of failure.”

Wilson feels it is important that Canadian businessmen of Morgan’s stature are receiving this kind of recognition from their country.

“A lot of the average Canadians do not know their business icons,” he lamented.

“There are people who would go to the end for the world for Gwyn Morgan,” he continued. “I’m one of them. I know many, many people, in the company and outside of the company, that have the deepest of respect for him. He’s probably got his detractors as well, I’m sure. But from my perspective, he’s a very unique dude.”

February 2011 I pipeline news north •

technology

27

at your fingertips

- COSSD now on Smartphones Brian Zinchuk Saskatchewan Pipeline News

Estevan – The Canadian Oilfield Service and Supply Directory (COSSD) has been the bible of the oil patch for many years now.

However, unlike the Bible, it is now seeing updates on a very regular basis.

The COSSD is available in several forms – the print version, now in its 30th edition, a similar DVD version, online at www.cossd.com, and on Garmin GPS devices. Two more ways have just been added – as applications on BlackBerry and iPhone smartphones. Rob Pentney, director of sales for COSSD, said, “Whatever you need, this gets it to you right away. It’s huge. We’re seeing a huge uptake.”

BlackBerry I tried the system on my BlackBerry Curve 8330. In the BlackBerry’s browser, go to www.cossd.com. Then scroll to the very bottom of the page and click where it says to add COSSD to BlackBerry. This initiates an app download.

The difference between the Garmin and BlackBerry app is that the Garmin GPS has the entire file downloaded to it.

The BlackBerry accesses the network to pull from it. Clicking on the app, you can search by keyword/category, or business name. for both these search types, you can also optionally search by location.

It’s not the prettiest interface I’ve seen, but then again, I haven’t seen a lot of pretty interfaces on the Curve 8330.

Maybe beauty is an iPhone thing.

A search for “Bert Baxter” successfully pulled up the Estevan trucking firm’s phone number. If you click on the number, you can call directly from the application. Doing the same search on the Garmin GPS, I spelled out “Bert Baxter.”

No match was found. Perhaps they don’t advertise.

Taking another stab at it, a search for “Renegade” brought up Renegade Oilfield Construction, located 1 km from my location, as indicated by the GPS. My Garmin Nuvi 265W GPS can be paired with a cellphone by Bluetooth, allowing it to function as a speakerphone.

When I reactivated the pairing, it allowed me to dial the number for Renegade simply by touching the number on the screen. iPod Touch I tested the COSSD Mobile app on my wife’s new 4th generation iPod Touch.

The iPod is analogous to the iPhone, however, it is tied to Wi-Fi signal and cannot dial out directly from the directory.

Using the App Store on the iPod Touch, a search for COSSD turned up “COSSD Mobile” as a free app. Installation took just seconds. The app screen provides a search box, major categories, and categories by letter. Looking for pipeline contractors, a tap on the “p” brings up two columns with dozens of categories, including “pipeline contractors.”

The list had 127 entries, but I could only access those who have paid ads.

Companies whose numbers are listed, but have not paid for ads, are not accessible. Tapping “Bristow Projects,” a company I wrote about last month, it

Devon Canada donates more than $32,000 to the United Way of Northern B.C. Devon Canada

Devon Canada Corporation is proud to announce a donation of more than $32,000 to the United Way of Northern British Columbia.

These funds were raised by employees in Devon’s Fort St John District during their United Way campaign and will be used to support a number of different agencies and programs within the region.

Devon employees raised the money through personal donations, a silent auction and prize raffles.

“We are very proud of the effort all our employees made in this year’s campaign,” said Chris Dumanowski, Devon’s Fort St John district superintendent. “Local non-profits count on United Way funding to help them through the year, and I think our commitment to the communities where we live and work is definitely evident in how much we were able to raise.”

Volunteerism is the cornerstone

of Devon’s community investment program. During Devon’s 2010 United Way campaign, the company raised over $1.5 million for United Way agencies in Alberta and northeast British Columbia. In addition, a number of employees volunteered time through Days of Caring at various organizations in both provinces.

Devon Canada Corporation is the Canadian operating subsidiary of Devon Energy Corporation of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The company’s portfolio of natural gas and oil properties provides stable, environmentally responsible production and a strong platform for future growth.

Devon Canada’s production mix is about 53% natural gas and 47% oil and natural gas liquids. The company produces approximately 193,000 barrels of oil per day equivalent (boed) before royalties and represents one quarter of Devon Energy’s total production.

Devon employs approximately 1,500 people in Calgary and its Canadian field, and has approximately 5,500 employees worldwide.

gave me their text listing, as well as a link to their website. A tap on that link took me to their home page. Listings on both the BlackBerry and iPhone are updated daily.

Garmin A year ago, I field tested the Garmin oil patch mapping software put out by COSSD called PatchMap, and an early version of the COSSD on the Garmin.

This is a more updated version.

To download the file, the link can be found on the main www.cossd.com web page. There are four steps. First, plug it in. Then click on “find devices.” This will likely result in a security warning.

You have to allow it to run the add-on. I had previously installed the Garmin Communicator plugin. In my case, I am using a Garmin Nuvi 265W, a lower end unit. The computer identified it, and obtained the unlock code when instructed.

It took less than 10 seconds to download the file on a high speed connection.

And then I was lost.

I didn’t know how to look for something using it. However, since then COSSD has added a helpful “How-To” pdf file on their website with precise, illustrated instructions on how to use it. To use the COSSD on a Garmin GPS, select “Where to?” on the main page of the GPS. Then scroll down to the “Extras.” It will appear as “COSSD Advertiser Listings.”

These listings are now updated weekly, so it makes sense to plug in your GPS ever once in a while to get the latest updates.

While in Weyburn, I activated the listings, and it gave me an arrow and a distance to each of the closest companies listed. This can be really helpful when

you’re in a strange town and need to find someone. Yes, you could simply enter in their street address, but once you’ve found the listing, you don’t have to. It will point you where you need to go.

In the future, another JuneWarrenNickle’s product, Nickle’s Rig Locator database, updated daily, will also be available for the Garmin, according to Pentney.

“You’ll be able to see every rig location every day.”

It will be more applicableto drilling rigs than service rigs, however, as service rigs move around frequently. Pentney said there is about a 96-97 per cent accuracyfor drilling rigs, while service rigs are about 40to 50 per cent accurate.

Access to this servicewill require a subscription to Nickle’s Rig Locator (www. riglocator.ca).

Conclusion: All three applications do what they are intended to do – provide access to phone numbers you need, when you need them, without a lot of hassle. Do remember, though, that you are only getting the phone number of people who pay to advertise, whereas with a telephone white pages directory, you would presumably get listings.

Essentially, if your business is not in the directory, you will be missed when clients are looking for you.

I would suggest the strongest setup would have the directory on both your smartphone as well as your GPS. The smartphone is easier to enter search information, with a better keyboard layout. The GPS, however, ties searches to your present location. Searching for a supply store near Arcola and getting one in Grande Prairie is not going to be that helpful.

Talisman donates $60,000 cont’d from pg 5 “When you look at a community, and what’s important in a community,” he said, “you can’t do things on your own.

Everybody needs to participate and work with each other. And it’s about partnerships. And the willingness of corporations who are in our area – I feel that they see the importance of the role that they can play.

“And I think it’s key that companies like Talisman are stepping up and making those contributions.”

The new girls dormitory should be ready for September, 2011. It will join

existing facilities that include 12 km of cross-country skiing trails, 23 km of hiking trails, a bouldering wall, and equipment such as cross-country skis, snowshoes, and canoes. A community grant, intended to pay for solar lighting for the new building, should round out the funding provided by Talisman to cover the cost of the new building.

Talisman has also shown its support for School District 60 and the Hudson’s Hope School in the past by providing picnic tables and health snacks for the students, as well as participating in an initiative to curb speeding in front of the school.

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Noel Project - minimizing the carbon footprint cont’d from pg 11 These are all impressive numbers for a natural gas development in terms of minimizing its carbon footprint and its footprint on the land.

The project also uses solar energy – augmented by a gas fuelled thermal electric generator during periods of insufficient sunlight – to power its electric chemical pumps and electrohydraulic valve actuators rather than their gas powered alternatives.

“Well sites are near zero emission,” said Wyke.

“The automation system, using fiber optic cable, increases efficiency and reliability as it allows operations to conduct remote investigation of process upsets and allows for remote starting of equipment,” Wyke continued, discussing other new and innovative aspects of the project.

“The automation also provides diagnostic information to the maintenance group that allows for remote troubleshooting and [the ability to] dispatch the right craftsman with the required parts.”

Events surrounding the Gulf of Mexico oil spill last summer precipitated the sale of the Noel project to Apache.

BP established a US $20 billion compensation fund to pay for damage caused by the spill after a White House led agreement with the oil company was concluded on June 16th, 2010.

The unique Noel project, approximately 60 km south of Dawson Creek, was among the western Canadian assets that BP sold to Apache in order to create that fund.

“This was a swift and significant move in support of our [Gulf of Mexico] financial obligations,” said BP spokesperson Robert Wine of the Apache deal, that also included Western Desert in Egypt and onshore US Permian gas.

“The agreed prices for these assets [were] very strong, reflecting the quality of assets throughout BP’s portfolio, and also strong market appetite for high quality assets.”

An auto pig launcher at Apache Canada’s Noel site can be operated remotely from a control room to push condensation water out of the pipeline, preventing corrosion in the pipeline. By being able to operate the pig launcher remotely, Apache is able to improve Photo courtesy of Apache Canada workplace safety and efficiency.

At the time of the deal, only two of three major facilities proposed for the project had been completed by BP. “The third major facility was completed exactly as the other two facilities and came on stream in late December,” said Wyke.

The facility has earned a Best Practice Award at the 2009 World Gas Conference and a 2010 Steward of Excellence Award from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

“The oil and gas industry’s reputation is based on performance and com-

munication,” said CAPP spokesperson Travis Davis about industry recognition of the Noel achievement. “Demonstrating performance through successes such as the Noel project is essential to ensure we meet the expectations of Canadians.”

Keeping it local - trades training at NLC cont’d from pg 13 Another change at the college in recent years has been the addition of simulated well site that serves as a practical educational tool for the Oil and Gas Field Operations students.

“It’s a project that actually started, I would say, maybe four or five years ago, initially,” said Stacy Smith, Chair of Trades and Apprenticeship. “The premise behind it was to provide kind of more of an expanded, hands-on facility for our oil and gas field operators to go and train in. So, the idea was to build kind of a mock-up of a production site.”

The facility has been built with the help of a $70,000 contribution from the provincial government, as well as numerous donations from oil and gas industry companies. It allows students to practice a number of the tasks that they will have to perform on a regular basis after graduation, but in the safety of a completely gas-free environment.

The Oil and Gas Field Operations program is clearly one of the most popular programs at the college and it has grown in recent years to satisfy the demands of industry.

“We run two intakes per year of sixteen students,” said Lekstrom. “That program has been running for over ten years. A couple of years ago, we upped the numbers because the need in the industry had increased.”

“It’s a four and a half month program – eighteen week program – and [it] puts them through four levels of gas field operations,” he added. “And from there they can go out and become field operators. We also have a program, Power Engineering, and in the Power Engineering – it’s not directly related to oil and gas, but we have an oil and gas flavour to it. And what it is, is a ten month program.”

Lekstrom also emphasizes that many of the skills that students acquire at Northern Lights are transferable to other industries, which he considers to be very important.

“We’ve seen in the past where the oil and gas hits some peaks and hits some valleys,” he explained. “And at that time people can move into forestry, mining, construction, different industrial areas that are related, maybe not directly to oil and gas, but because the trades are inter-provincial – most of the trades that we do are inter-provincial status, which means they’re good throughout Canada – they can have transferability between provinces. The Red Seal designation … is internationally recognized as well. So, we have a lot of people that will work international.”

Industrial Instrumentation Mechanic students at Northern Lights College gain practical experience in their classrooms in the college’s Industry Training Centre.

Photo courtesy of Northern Lights Colege

February 2011 I pipeline news north •

careers

29

FIELD SUPERVISOR Grande Prairie Base Ferus Inc. specializes in the production, storage, supply and transport of liquid nitrogen and liquid carbon dioxide for the energy industry. www.ferus.ca Ferus requires a Field Supervisor to perform duties associated with coordinating the movement of product and operation of Ferus equipment on location to ensure customer programs are completed as scheduled. The candidate will also be responsible for ensuring Ferus policies and safety standards are maintained and adhered to at all times on customer locations. The position is based out of the Grande Prairie Operations Base. The candidate must be willing to travel, work extended hours, able to work with minimum supervision, and able to take direction.

Responsibilities & Duties: • Daily coordination of transports and product deliveries to customer locations • Establish & coordinate product requirements with Field Consultants & service company personnel • Educate non Ferus personnel on Ferus equipment operating procedures and ensure safety policies are followed at all times • Maintain strong working relations with customers and service company field personnel • Work with customer field representative or service personnel to resolve on site concerns • Maintain field documentation & paperwork and provide to dispatch office • Coordinate accident response plans in the field Skills, Experience & Certification: • High School Diploma • Minimum of 4 years frac related experience • Previous supervisory experience an asset • Strong interpersonal skills • Ability to manage diverse personality types on a professional level • First Aid, H2S Alive and/or GODI preferred but not required • Class 1 license required • Basic computer skills required

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The 3-weeks-in, 2-weeks-out field positions currently available are: Supervisors, Fracturing & Coiled Tubing Operators, Fracturing & Coiled Tubing Transport Operators Electronics Technicians/Instrumentation Technicians Heavy Duty Mechanics Please include this code on your application: CWS003

Ferus offers a competitive compensation package including a competitive base salary, bonus incentive plan & an excellent Benefits Package, including a Group RSP Savings Plan.

If you are interested in working in a positive and dynamic environment, please email your resume by February 25, 2011 to humanresources@ferus.ca or fax 1-888-879-6125 Please reference: Ad #FSGP-01-11

Call us: 1-877-908-FRAC (3722) Fax us: 1-403-234-6655 Apply online: www.calfrac.com/careers

We thank you for your interest; however, only those applicants considered for the position will be contacted.

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11-228 Calfrac -Pipline News North 5 col x 100 lines (5.667” x 7.1”)

Building Leaders.

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30 • PIPELINE NEWS NORTH I February 2011

careers & trades Building Leaders.

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Flint is a market leader providing an expanding range of integrated products and services for the energy industry across North America. Our employees’ safety is our foremost priority and our safety management system is world-class. Flint’s benefits package and training and development programs are one of the key reasons why candidates choose Flint as their ‘employer of choice’. Flint provides employees with all of the tools they need to grow and excel both personally and professionally.

APPLY NOW at www.flintenergy.jobs or call our Recruitment team at 1-866-GO-FLINT 1-866-463-5468 Thank you to all who apply; only short-listed candidates will be contacted.

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We offer industry competitive wages based on an hourly pay schedule with automatic pay increases, flexible spending account and a Group RSP Savings Plan. We offer a work rotation of 15 days on & 6 days off. Preference will be given to applicants with off-road experience.

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To book your careers display ad contact a sales rep today!

• Tom Kirshner 250-785-5631 • Ryan Wallace 250-785-5631 • Dan Pryzbylski 250-782-4888 Ad cost based on a line rate of .99 cents/line

Canyon is the fastest growing Fracturing Company in Canada. If your looking for a career with a leading organization that promotes relationships, success, and innovation then we need to talk!

“JOIN OUR WINNING TEAM”     

Frac Fluid Division

Coil Division  Coil Operators

Crew Cab Operators Data Van Operators Blender/Chemical Operators Pump Operators Iron Operators

Acid & Cement Division  Equipment Operators

Applicant requirements:  Self motivated  Work flexible hours  Safety Focused

 Clean Class 1 License  Team Enabled

Why Canyon?

Canyon is a dynamic, rapidly growing company powered by motivated and successful people. Canyon’s business continues to be conducted with integrity and consistently reflects the value of our diverse workforce, customers and suppliers. Our premium compensation package contains an industry leading benefits plan, including RRSP matching and a confidential employee and family assistance program. If you value success achieved in an ethical environment, built on strong relationships, please contact us.

We thank all applicants; however only those selected for an initial interview will be contacted.

Send a resume to email: hr@canyontech.ca or Fax: (780) 357-9409

FRACTURING ACIDIZING COILED TUBING CEMENTING

www.canyontech.ca

February 2011 I pipeline news north •

publication schedule

Full Page 6 col x 206 ag (9.88” x 14.71”)

Half Page horizontal 6 col x 102 ag (9.88” x 7.28”)

Half Page vertical 3 col x 206 ag (4.86” x 14.71”)

march advertising rates (colour included)

Quarter Page vertical only 3 col x 102 ag (4.86” x 7.28”)

Banner 6 col x 42 ag (9.88” x 3”) – 1/2 Banner ( ---) 3 col x 42 ag (4.86” x 3”)

“Pipeliner” 2 col x 32 ag (3.18” x 2.28”)

Back Page - $1500 Full Page - $1200 Half Page - $750 Quarter Page - $450 Front Banner - $500 (limited Banner number) - $400 Half Banner - $275 Pipeliner - $100 Discounts: 1 yr - 25% 6 mths - 15%, 3 mths - 10%

31

32 • PIPELINE NEWS NORTH I February 2011

The truck of choice in today’s oil patch.

2011 Toyota Tundra NEW 2010’S NOW AT CLEARANCE PRICES Save up to $4,260

Call Brenda To Get Pre-approved Today 1.800.663.3895

Starting at

17,890

$ 2 Models to Choose from

2010 TOYOTA MATRIX

Save up to $4,205

Was $31,215

Was $33,854

NOW Be Eco Friendly

Brenda Shaw

28,854

$

2010 TOYOTA PRIUS

NOW Last Remaining

26,760

2010 TOYOTA VENZA

NOW

15,311

$ $220/Month for 84 Months

#10213

2010 TOYOTA YARIS

Was $44,360

Starting at

$

#10142

Was $18,620

14,890

$ 2 Models to Choose from

2010 TOYOTA COROLLA

Start the year off right with great offers on select Toyota Models. ††

NOW Last Remaining

36,995

$

#1076

2010 TOYOTA TUNDRA ST Celebrate with Toyota! Get up to $1000 in cash bonuses on our most popular models, on top of our already great offers.

www.peacecountrytoyota.ca

801 - 118th Ave Dawson Creek, BC

Mon to Fri 8am - 6pm Sat 9am - 5pm

1-800-663-3895 250-782-6614

“Incentives will be deducted from the negotiated price after taxes and for some models all or a specified portion of the incentives cannot be combined with special lease and finance offers (i.e. is “noncombinable”). Quantities of certain vehicles are limited and dealer trade may be required. Dealer trade availability may also be limited and will very by model. Offers subject to change;cancellation without notice. Offers valid on retail delivery of select new 2011 unregistered Toyota vehicles when purchased/financed/leased, registered and delivered by February 28, 2011. For all available incentives and rates on 2010 and 2011 Toyotas, contact your dealer today.

605575