Bill 24, the Carbon Capture and Storage Statutes Amendment Act, was passed using closure, on Dec. 2, 2010 with very limited debate in the legislature. From a landowners’ perspective this bill expropriated the pore space under our land and gave it to the province – with zero compensation.
We might say “so what.” It doesn’t affect what we do on the surface growing crops or pasturing livestock, but this will affect you – make no mistake about that.
It gets a little complicated because we must understand that the oil and gas business is undergoing a fundamental change. The new norm is the horizontal well, hydro-fracked every 10 metres down the horizontal well bore underneath practically every square foot of your land.
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Think of a quarter section where every square foot is the pay zone instead of a vertical hole where the pay zone is very narrow. The oil company can drill several horizontal holes off of one pad and although their pay zone will include literally hundreds of target sites you will be paid for one small surface lease, when in fact the whole quarter section is affected.
If you owned the pore space you could expect a lease payment for the whole quarter, but when the government expropriated your pore space, guess who will get that money?
Our group has argued for some time that when a company drills under our land from a pad on the neighbour’s, we should be getting paid for subterranean trespass. We had intended to challenge an offset well in the near future, but now this option has been squashed by Bill 24.
The third concern here is a devious bit of manipulation within the bill. Bill 24 first declared the pore space a mineral, then designated the pore space the property of the province. This allows it to be able to say it can now enforce a CO2 injection well on your land.
The whole concept of property ownership allows the mineral holder to access the surface, so he may access his minerals. Because pore space is now a mineral you cannot refuse the mineral holder the right to access his mineral – which the government has declared pore space is – therefore you can no longer stop any company from putting an injection well on your land. If you refuse, the Energy Resources Conservation Board will grant a “right of entry order” and the well will go ahead. You would be entitled to compensation for the small above-ground surface lease just like a regular oil or gas lease, but you would not be able to have any say in what was pumped into that injection well.
Of course there are other concerns. The safety of CO2 injection in a carbon capture scheme has not been considered very well.
Contamination of the fresh water aquifers is another risk that must be looked at. When CO2 leaks up through the strata it tends to bring some pretty nasty stuff with it. It would probably only be a matter of time until the CO2 found a path upwards, either through natural faults in the rocks or through the hundred of thousands of old abandoned wells, many whose existence isn’t even known.
This is very apparent at Calmar, Alberta where old gas wells from the early 1950s are leaking in a residential area and in fact one was in a schoolyard. It is almost certain that eventually our freshwater wells would be affected by leaking CO2. Without water, what do we have?
We call on the Alberta government to rescind Bill 24 and let everyone have a clear understanding of what we are getting into. It is very easy to sit in an office in Edmonton and say the risk is acceptable, not so easy when you and yours are the ones whose health and life are at stake!
