Water
Protecting and managing water is important to Shell and the community. We continuously take steps to manage our water use in a responsible and sustainable way. Shell conducts its operations in a manner that protects groundwater and reduces potable water use as reasonably practicable.
Reducing our impact
Water is a by-product of our Groundbirch operations. It is typically raised to the surface during oil and gas production and is also a by-product of some of the manufacturing processes we use. Our water management system includes storing and recycling our produced water and sharing our produced water with other industry users, but we still have excess water in our system that needs to be managed and disposed of in a responsible way.
- When fracking new wells, we use almost 100% recycled produced water.
- We minimize the use of fresh water by recycling and reusing water from our processing plants and gas wells (produced water).
- Water pipelines built throughout our field distribute water between our assets, minimize traffic, reduce emissions, noise and dust and improve road safety.
Improvements and updates
No single option allows us to manage surplus water. Groundbirch continues to investigate and evaluate collaborative and innovative ways of removing excess water from our system.
- Water recycling is enabled by the Groundbirch asset design, which separates water at the pad site and has a closed water system. Produced water from across the field is stored in two water hubs with a combined capacity of 190,000m3
- Through technological advancement, approximately 98% of Groundbirch’s water needs for all our operations are now met by recycled produced water. We supplement with reclaimed water as needed and limited amounts of surface water are also used for drilling, hydrotesting pipelines and dust control.
- In partnership with the City of Dawson Creek, B.C. we built a reclaimed water facility to treat the city’s wastewater for reuse in the industry and community. This reclaimed treated wastewater is stored in our water hub and the municipality now uses the reclaimed water for dust control on local roads and sells it to other producers to offset their freshwater use.
