Farms, fresh water, fish or fracking? We can’t have it all
B.C. faces hard choices on water use as record drought continues
What’s B.C.’s most precious natural resource? It’s not oil or gas, timber or gold, farmland or hydroelectricity. It’s water, which everything else relies on.
The province’s Peace region is the epicentre of a growing crisis that shows how fragile our society becomes without water – and how poorly our leaders have managed water until now.
B.C.’s entire northeast is experiencing a level 5 drought (the worst on the scale) and has been since Fall 2022. Regulators are now warning the region’s powerful oil and gas companies of “possibly limited water supply” by summer.
A showdown is looming between the industry most responsible for climate breakdown, and the rest of us who rely on increasingly scarce water to grow food, fight fires and generate electricity.
Fracking destroys fresh water
Plenty of industries hold licences to extract water in B.C., but only oil and gas companies are allowed to permanently pollute it. And the price they pay is miniscule: $2.25 per million litres.
There are 9,000 or so gas wells in the Northeast, nearly all of them hydraulically fractured. Each “frack job” uses up to 30 million litres of water, which is mixed with toxic chemicals and blasted deep underground to crack apart rock formations containing methane gas.
After fracking, the companies pump that contaminated water deep underground, into abandoned oil and gas wells. Meanwhile our government asks us to take shorter showers.
For context, a human being needs three to four litres of water per day just to stay alive. Even if you include showers and toilets, sprinklers and dishwashers, 30 million litres of water is enough to meet one day of water needs for 91,000 people in Canada.
Put another way, 30 million litres is 12 Olympic swimming pools of water permanently removed from creeks, aquifers or wetlands. If LNG export terminals are built they will need thousands of new fracking wells to fill the pipelines – and that means destroying even more of our water.
Chip in to stop fracking in B.C.
LNG companies want more hydro power
There’s another way oil and gas interests are about to collide with the rest of the province, and that’s over the issue of electricity use.
Like water, oil and gas companies get clean power from the province at discounted rates. But their appetite is enormous. The proposed Ksi Lisims LNG terminal alone would gobble up the entire projected power output of the Site C dam.
Speaking of Site C, the water reservoir behind the $16 billion power station was supposed to be filled last fall. BC Hydro postponed that by a year. Now, with streamflow on the Peace River well below average, it’s not clear how much future power the dam will actually produce.
All over B.C. glaciers are melting and snowpack is low, reducing the amount of water available for power generation. Last year B.C. imported about a fifth of its electricity from Alberta and western U.S. states, because our dams couldn’t keep up.
BC Hydro is planning a call for new power this year that will include utility-scale wind and solar. The Crown corporation is promising to prioritise projects in Indigenous communities. Are we really going to give that new renewable energy capacity to fracking and LNG companies?
Fires, fish, fodder for livestock
The Northeast is facing another threat: more than 100 wildfires that burned underground all winter and are now smouldering near pipelines and highways.
Dan Davies, MLA for Peace River North, has written to the Forests minister pleading for the resources to stop these zombie fires before they spring to life again.
With hot, dry conditions forecasted across the province, it looks like water bombers and helicopters will be busy all over B.C. very soon. They need water to fight fires.
So do fish, which have struggled with catastrophically low streamflow in recent years. Images of dead salmon clogging a creekbed in Heiltsuk territory went viral in October 2022 after stream walkers stumbled across the grisly scene.
This winter, snowpack levels on Vancouver Island are just 30 per cent of normal. South Coast snowpack sits at 41 per cent. Will salmon even be able to get into their spawning streams?
Meanwhile farmers are searching for hay again after last year’s drought left many without enough feed for their livestock. Pasture needs either rain or irrigation to grow.
Last August the provincial government chipped in $150,000 to help drought-stricken farmers ship surplus hay from other regions. It’s a stopgap solution, as water woes spread across the West.
Time to get serious about water
This province is sleepwalking into a water crisis that will force hard choices about who gets priority access to water, and the energy we generate using water.
The Northeast is the canary in the coalmine, along with neighbouring Alberta which is struggling with the same brutal and unrelenting drought.
For years both provinces have encouraged industrial users to waste fresh water with rock-bottom rates. That needs to stop. Why should fracking companies have the right to permanently pollute water and remove it from the environment?
We’ve also promised hydroelectricity to oil and gas companies that is needed to power heat pumps, electric vehicles and other technology to reduce fossil fuel use. It’s one or the other. We should not be using clean water or clean power to extract more dirty energy.
Like other aspects of climate change, B.C. has been slow to grasp the scale and gravity of the water crisis. It’s not enough to offer rebates in a few municipalities for low-flow toilets. We need an emergency plan.
That includes shutting down oil and gas production the minute other water-use needs can’t be met, including environmental needs. We should not be subsidizing the industry most responsible for the crisis we’re in.
History is full of examples of corporations assuming a resource is unlimited and exploiting it to the point of collapse: Atlantic cod, beaver, old-growth trees. Let’s not be so careless with water.
We could emphasize more that burning the fossil fuels is causing climate change, that supplying dirty electricity from BC Hydros dams is also causing climate change through methane gas releases from reservoirs as anaerobic bacteria eat the soil and other organic matter that is in or falling into the reservoirs. As well we have to remember that the organic matter in valleys like that of the Peace River under threat from Site C are capable of feeding a million people fruits and vegetables and that preventing that destruction would leave water in the Peace River for irrigating those thousands of hectares.
Without water we will all die. Please save our water supply.
Great educational and concise expose to get the conversation going. Hopefully, this piece will get the visibility it deserves so that the public will push govt to do the right thing for BC citizens. Water has to trump the needs of oil and gas.
What a powerful article! Excellent writing!
Finally someone is listening to those of us who have been trying to get the attention of one track mind ministers. Climate change is a natural thing which has been going on for millions of years without our help or hinderance. Pollution on the other hand goes hand in hand with profit and of course money for bribes or whatever you want to call them to so called peoples representatives. Mount Polley should have been a warning to all levels of politicians but was not because of the donations. Instead of trying to remove one of life’s major building blocks from our atmosphere causing some very serious consequences we should be instead concentrating on trying to help the badly damaged earth and rivers heal themselves. But as usual we look the other way and let the elected officials look after for profit entities instead of the people and more importantly for life on the earth.
Jeremy Arney
This is an important article. Thank you Dogwood.
Great article, thank you!
Will there be any form of advertising to spread this message to BC residents? I’ll definitely donate more to help with that 😉
ABSOLUTELY! YES!
Well said, good to know this. No where in this province should we ever be so complacent. Fracking needs to stop, oil and gas companies need to step back and face reality and LNG needs to press the pause button for a year or 2 and get their research done honestly.
Without water, nothing can live.
Thank you for educating me about so many issues. I’m really overwhelmed now with my housing costs, but when that changes I will be able to help you a bit financially.
Excellent article. Timely topic.
Bev Bacon
I think a critical mass is building. We’ll find out in October. Spread the word.