CAROL CHRISTIAN
Today staff
Giving Mother Nature a helping hand, seedlings planting began last Wednesday at ConocoPhillips’ Surmont site as the company gets underway with its Faster Forests program, an accelerated reclamation program set to become standard operating procedure.
Under current legislation, companies are only required to re-seed land reclaimed with a grass mix species, but it can take dozens of years before natural tree growth returns and the site is restored naturally. The Faster Forests program recovers the forest ecosystem more proactively.
“What we’re trying to do is simply accelerate the reclamation cycle,” explained Peter Zimmerman, manager of environment and stakeholder engagement for oilsands. “So rather than have a site that might take five or 10 years before you start to get little seedlings established and grow, we’re trying to do that right out of the gate.”
Lands to be planted this year are all delineation drilling well sites, all about a half hectare in size.
ConocoPhillips turned to Outland Resources, a cross-Canada company offering silviculture services — the branch of forestry dealing with the development and care of forests — to Alberta’s forest and oil industries.
They also retained Al-Pac to supply the trees: commercial stock, and mostly aspens for this inaugural planting, although ConocoPhillips is also awaiting delivery of white spruce.
“It’s in the future that we are wanting to move to using different kinds of species that would be more than just commercial timber species that could be used for habitat enhancement or might be of interest for traditional use by First Nations,” Zimmerman said.
Some 30 areas on the Surmont lease, a joint venture with Total about 35 kilometres south of Fort McMurray, have been identified for this program, partly because of the number of trees available. Some of the sites earmarked for planting this year by ConocoPhillips were disturbed a year or two ago, while others will be from this past year.
This planting is expected to last up to two weeks with two or three sites planted a day, depending on how far apart they are. This way, planters are taking advantage of optimal planting time in July.
“You pretty well have to plant (in) late June, July. You can plant in the fall and we might chose to do that on some sites that might have access issues, but I understand that the mortality of the trees in the fall is a little bit higher. You get better success if you do it in the spring.”
The technical foundation for this program was borne from a 10-year University of Alberta study being funded by ConocoPhillips with a number of other organizations. At the midway point last year, the university released a report with a number of recommendations to accelerate the reclamation period.
Zimmerman explained Faster Forests is important because there are two dimensions to surface disturbance: the area disturbed, and the length of time that disturbance remains on the ground.
“So we kind of think that in terms of hectare years: how many hectares are disturbed over what time period,” Zimmerman said.
“You can reduce your footprint in kind of two ways. You can try to shrink the area you that you’re using and we’re looking at ways to try do that,” he said, citing the possibility of such measures as smaller well pads and skinnier pipelines. “But you come up to a point that you can’t reduce that anymore.
“The other thing you can do is try to recover your disturbance quicker … and that is the aspect of Faster Forests that we’re really focusing on right now, so we’re trying to decrease the cycle time of the reclamation.”
cchristian@fortmcmurraytoday.com
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