Imagine If Fracking, and Quakes, Were in Vancouver

Picture for a moment that you are in the provincial government and tasked with responding to a letter along these lines:

Dear Minister Adrian Dix,

I am writing to ask you to cancel the permit for the gas drilling pad just over a kilometre from my home and two kilometres from the elementary school where my daughters Tammy and Melanie go.

As you know, this pad is one of many planned for Vancouver-Renfrew. Twenty-four wells will be drilled and fracked on it. Much of the gas produced will be sour, meaning it is laced with hydrogen sulphide, a neurotoxin that can render children and adults unable to breathe.

I am on Lord Selkirk’s PAC and the principal and the teachers have told us that proposed emergency response plans, including whisking kids onto school buses or sheltering students and staff in place, will not work and lives could be lost in the event of a sour gas leak.

But more than that, our PAC and school staff are terrified by the earthquakes triggered by fracking. Such earthquakes have already reached magnitude 5.7 in China and killed people there. Are our children to be next?

Lastly, my neighbours and I have homes that are our greatest assets. Last year my home insurance premium was $2,500. But my insurer has told me that if my home is damaged or destroyed during a fracking earthquake there will be no coverage.

It is unconscionable that the BC Energy Regulator approved this well. Please cancel it!

Sincerely...

While Energy Minister Adrian Dix received no such letter and no fracking well pads are planned for his riding, it captures the lived experiences of residents in British Columbia’s Peace River region.

Oil and gas wells are common and drilling is increasing to feed LNG Canada and proposed plants.

And already nine schools are in designated emergency response zones because they are close to potentially dangerous oil and gas industry infrastructure.

Upper Pine, with students in kindergarten to Grade 8, is one of them. There have been times when as many as six buses were parked outside its doors with drivers on standby in case a sour gas leak at a nearby well required an emergency evacuation.

It’s also troubling that potentially dangerous wells can be located close to people’s homes and that both the BC Energy Regulator, or BCER, and oil and gas companies know earthquakes triggered by fracking are climbing in number and intensity, with a notably strong induced earthquake occurring mid-week last week with a magnitude of 4.3 according to Natural Resources Canada’s earthquake database and a magnitude of 4.44 according to a seismicity app maintained by the BCER.

The earthquake magnitude as reported by the BCER would make the quake the second-strongest earthquake ever to be induced by fracking operations in B.C.’s Peace region, and a harbinger of a future where both more frequent and stronger earthquakes triggered by fracking are likely to occur.

Last year also marked a record for more earthquakes of magnitude 3 or greater.

Scientists say more powerful earthquakes could lie ahead for the Peace River region, along the lines of those that destroyed homes and that killed people in China’s Sichuan province in 2019.

Fracking has killed. It can kill again.

In the sacrifice zone

A recent study flagged the possibility that an earthquake of 6.1 magnitude is possible in the Peace River region, which was not seismically active until the advent of water-intensive fracking operations in 2005. A 6.1 magnitude event would be 30 times bigger than the 4.5 magnitude event in November 2018 that forced the emergency evacuation of hundreds of workers then building the Site C dam and that was triggered by a fracking operation.

Homeowners in the Peace have also been told by their insurers that if their homes are damaged or destroyed by fracking earthquakes, there will be no insurance coverage. And, rubbing salt in the wound, landowners like Richard Kabzems whose homes have already shook as a result of nearby earthquakes have been told they have no standing to appeal potential quake-inducing gas wells from being constructed near their properties.

Dix and many of his cabinet colleagues who reside in the populous southwest corner of the province wouldn’t countenance this for a second in their own ridings. And if they did, they would soon be looking for new jobs.

So why do they deem it appropriate for our brothers and sisters in the north?

For many people living in B.C.’s urban southwest corner, the Peace River region may as well be Siberia. Few travel to it to experience its vastness and unique and varied beauty.

Fewer still travel its back roads to see how permanently and grievously its lands and waters have been scarred by multiple industrial developments, including three massive hydroelectric dams, extensive clear-cut logging, mining and, last but not least, oil and gas developments.

The cumulative impact of all of this has been to turn the Peace River region into a sprawling industrial sacrifice zone where many landowners feel under assault and meaningful opportunities for the region’s First Peoples to carry out their treaty-protected rights to hunt, fish, trap and gather plants have been torn asunder, as Justice Emily Burke of the B.C. Supreme Court ruled in her landmark judgment of June 2021.

In that judgment, Burke was unsparing in her criticism of the provincial Oil and Gas Commission, or OGC, finding that the predecessor to today’s BC Energy Regulator had not once in its 23 years ever denied an oil or gas company applicant a requested permit on grounds that it posed a threat to treaty rights, wildlife or cumulative impacts.

A history of lax regulation

This will come as no surprise to those who know the history of the OGC, which was created by the then-NDP government in the late 1990s to expedite oil and gas industry approvals.

The regulator exceeded the expectations of both its political masters and industry backers at this, vastly reducing the time between when a permit was applied for and when it was granted.

But on other matters, like protecting the public interest and holding companies to account when they violated health and safety and environmental regulations, the regulator displayed a shocking lack of zeal in penalizing companies that flagrantly violated numerous regulations.

For example, the OGC allowed close to 100 unlicensed dams to be built on its watch by fracking companies in violation of provincial dam safety regulations.

Many of those structures were built with not even the most basic safety elements like spillways in place, meaning they were at risk of failing. Yet not a single company was fined for its actions.

The regulator also suppressed information showing how hundreds of gas wells were leaking toxins into the ground and potentially contaminating groundwater resources.

It also for years suppressed information showing how oil and gas companies routinely violated modest rules aimed at protecting threatened woodland caribou populations.

The coming boom

All of this in a region that is about to experience the largest and most sustained increase in gas drilling and fracking in its history.

Later this year, the massive LNG Canada facility in Kitimat will begin processing large quantities of methane gas piped from the Peace River region. The facility will supercool the gas until it turns to liquid and then load the liquefied natural gas (methane) into the cavernous holds of ocean tankers for shipment to customers in Asia.

Once in production, the plant will require a steady stream of methane. The only way to ensure that supply will be to constantly drill and frack new gas wells. That’s because gas flows at fracked wells fall precipitously after the first burst of production, necessitating a perpetual drilling and brute-force fracking program.

Today in the Peace River region, most companies drill their wells about two kilometres down into the earth before reorienting the drilling direction horizontally and drilling out an average of nearly three kilometres more.

But this is an average. Many wells drilled in northeast B.C. and next door in northwest Alberta now have horizontal legs that far exceed three kilometres. In Alberta recently a horizontal wellbore set a record at more than 5,892 metres in length, almost six kilometres.

Since horizontal wells are fracked in stages with each stage capable of triggering earthquakes, it is entirely possible that earthquake epicentres could be five kilometres or more away from some well pads in the Peace River region. These earthquakes, moreover, shake the ground differently because they are nearer to the surface than naturally occurring quakes, and therefore pose unique risks to nearby houses and other structures.

The most recent significant earthquake to push past the magnitude 4 mark in northeast B.C. last week occurred north of the Halfway River. In response to questions filed by The Tyee, the BCER disclosed on Friday that the earthquake was triggered at a fracking operation by Tourmaline Oil Corp., Canada’s largest methane gas producer. The BCER went on to say:

“As, per regulation, the operator suspended all fracturing activity and has been in communication with the BCER. The operator is not planning on resuming fracturing operations at the well-pad in question.”

At present, regulations require a fracking company to consult with homeowners only if their proposed well pads are within 1.3 kilometres of their homes.

Even then, as noted in a recent report in The Tyee, when such a consultation happened and local homeowners objected to the proposal on grounds that an ensuing earthquake might damage or destroy their homes, the provincial regulator granted the company’s permit anyway.

All British Columbians matter

Every time the regulator authorizes a fracking operation, it knows there is a possibility that an earthquake will be triggered. Today, roughly one earthquake occurs for every four wells fracked in the province.

While the majority of such earthquakes are very small, they are still earthquakes. And some of them are much stronger. The incidence of “felt” earthquakes of magnitude 3 or greater is spiking in northeast B.C., with 2024 being the highest year on record.

None of this would be acceptable in Adrian Dix’s riding or anywhere else in the Lower Mainland. And it should not be acceptable in northeast B.C., a sparsely populated region, to be sure, but a region that is still home to nearly 62,000 people.

The health and well-being of all British Columbians matters, even more so for those who are most directly in harm’s way and who have paid and continue to pay the highest price for the provincial government’s energy ambitions (both hydroelectric in the form of the Site C dam and hydrocarbon in the form of liquefied natural gas exports).

The surest way to stop fracking-induced earthquakes is to simply stop fracking altogether.

But with all new and future gas and light oil production in the province linked to fracking, and the provincial government insisting that methane is a climate solution when it demonstrably is not, that is not going to happen.

The next best thing would be to lower the risks of damaging fracking-induced earthquakes by embracing the precautionary principle and declaring firm no-fracking zones in proximity to all homes, businesses, farmsteads or any structures where people live, work and play.

If the lives of all British Columbians matter, that should mean no gas wells or fracking operations within five kilometres of anyone’s home. Such a prohibition would also require no horizontal leg of any fracked well to be closer to a home than five kilometres as well.

Dams matter. Do homeowners?

The regulator itself has already acknowledged the need for a special set of rules governing but not eliminating fracking within five kilometres of BC Hydro’s three Peace River dams. Should one or more of those structures fail as a result of an induced earthquake, the results would be catastrophic for thousands of residents in the Peace River region, both in B.C. and downstream in Alberta.

Respected scientists like Gail Atkinson, a seismic expert, geologist and professor emeritus at Western University, have advocated these areas to be declared frack-free zones outright. Atkinson recently advanced this idea in a special report on CBC’s The National, which addressed the issue of increased numbers of fracking-induced earthquakes in northeast B.C.

That same thinking should apply to the zones around people’s homes.

And that should be a starting point. In the unwelcome event that homes are damaged or destroyed by earthquakes linked to fracking operations outside of such zones, the zones should be increased further in recognition of that.

As things now stand, the provincial government and its energy regulator are engaging in a game of Russian roulette every time a new well is approved for fracking. But with the important caveat that when the trigger is pulled and a bullet in the form of a powerful earthquake is in the chamber, it is not the regulator and its political masters who bear the direct consequences, but vulnerable residences living in harm’s way.

None of us should be asked to live with that.