Answers on industry emissions pursued by Northern Health.

Northeastern BC’s booming natural gas industry has been a boon to many and a burden to few. The resources-intensive corner of the province is contributing in many ways to provincial coffers, even as the industry is negotiating through a rut of lower-than-expected gas prices.

Perhaps as a result of the slackened pace of exploration and upstream development, the byproducts of the booming natural gas industry are beginning to come under scrutiny. Those living within visual range of flare stacks have long expressed concerns about the long-term effects of emissions.

Despite anecdotal evidence, there’s been little concrete action in terms of measuring and classifying the effects of those contaminants, such as nitrogen oxide, sulphur oxide and volatile organic compounds.

Now Northern Health, the regional health administration covering Northeastern BC, is calling for action based on a principle as old as bureaucracy itself: you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

In a recent letter to BC’s Oil and Gas Commission (OGC), medical health officer Dr. Charl Badenhorst requested “a transparent process to collect and report essential available data from key role players to (assure) the public and the medical health officers that the industry is managed in a safe and responsible way.”

Data not available

“There are discussions in terms of how we can get summary data involved from companies,” he explained to Northwest Business. “When there are exceedances, it gets reported to the Oil and Gas Commission. It’s important that we have some kind of summary data that could look at exposure from sources over time.. we don’t have it at this stage.”

Badenhorst has led an oil and gas working group for the last two years, a roundtable that includes provincial and local government, industry, health professionals and landowner advocates. As a result of slow but constructive action, Badenhorst said the group expects to have air monitors up and running by the end of the year.

“Once we have that information, we can make an estimate of the long term exposure to people,” he said. “If you ask me, ‘what’s the air quality of high-risk areas in the Northeast?’, I don’t know. And we need to get that information. It’s probably available, but it’s not available in a way that we can use it, from a health point of view.”

“As a group, we are working and will involve experts in the field to determine where are the best spots to do air quality monitoring. Then we have to agree to what will be measured, and how we interpret and use that information. It’s a complex process.. you have one shot in terms of trying to get exposure data, which will be limited to maybe two or three weeks per site.”

The effects of the industry on public health has been on the radar of Northern Health before. A December 2007 report from former medical health officer Dr. Lorna Medd called for, among other measures, more health funding to address the impacts associated with the industry. That report reached the provincial government, but seemed to have little impact.

A handful of previous studies have looked into the effects of long-term exposure to gas infrastructure. The six-year, $17-million Western Interprovincial Scientific Studies Association (WISSA) was funded by the four western provinces to look at the effects of sour gas on cattle and starling.

Though the results didn’t show any startling trends for the animals involved, the study did little to clarify the effects of gas infrastructure on people.

“We really lacked confidence there was any ability to look at exposure for humans,” said Dr. Ray Copes, a consultant to the WISSA study and now a director of environmental health at the BC Centre for Disease Control.

BC emissions numbers low: researcher

While the province keeps track of emissions from the upstream oil and gas industry, an exclusive focus on large point sources of emissions has left out the cumulative effect of thousands of smaller sources.

According to research carried out by U.B.C. Forest Resources Management graduate student Judi Krzyzanowski, actual atmospheric emissions in Northeast British Columbia are significantly higher than the numbers reported by the province.

“In essence, these thousands of ‘small’ sources together produce emissions comparable to the large reported sources,” explained the doctoral candidate.

All emission reporting in Canada is now carried out through the National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI), a process that’s only carried out for sites that involve more than 20,000 employee hours per year. Most of BC’s upstream oil and gas sector sources fall short of that threshold.

The NRPI began in 1994 and is now used for all reporting, as required since 2000 under  the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. Prior to that, the Criteria Air Contaminants (CAC) system was used in BC in order to measure sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and other pollutants known for their contribution to acid rain and photochemical smog.

“While reporting policy and practice have changed significantly, they are no more accurate or inclusive,” said Krzyzanowski. “The (Northeast) region really needs some air quality monitoring in high risk areas before we know for sure what actual levels of pollutants are. Based on modelling I conducted using the year 2000 emissions.. levels of some pollutants may reach levels capable of injuring ecosystems and human health.”

“However, models, although frequently used for regulatory purposes, are not known for their accuracy,” she added.

Less flaring near landowners

The 2006 BC Energy Plan calls for routine flaring to be reduced by 50 per cent by 2011, and eliminated by 2016. In a follow-up move last month (April 8), the OGC issued a directive to reduce flaring  during inline testing operations for new wells.

The move will come as a relief to many rural landowners, who’ve faced the prospect of daily exposure to thousands of small emissions from wellheads, compressor stations, and emergency shut-down valves forming a maze around their quarter sections. The directive is specifically aimed at wells located within 1.25 kilometres of a residence and three kilometres or less from pipeline infrastructure, and the OGC notes the move is partially aimed at addressing public concerns about air quality and visual impacts.

For safety reasons, well completion clean-up flaring is not subject to the directive. The OGC notes that the consequences of poor cleanup include piping erosion from sand – the exact cause of the failure of an EnCana wellhead near Pouce Coupe, BC last November. That failure resulted in an eight-hour  hydrogen sulphide leak, alleged exposure-related injuries to livestock, and an embarrassing mistake for North America’s biggest gas producer.

Last month (March 11), the Peace River Regional District voted to support a call for a public inquiry into that gas leak. The landowners group who initiated the call for inquiry told the board they hope it can prove whether negative health affects resulted from the leak, and cited Badenhorst’s support for their concerns.

Mobile monitoring coming to BC Peace

In a related provincial action, BC’s Mobile Air Monitoring Laboratory (MAML) will visit four locations in the BC Peace this summer – Tomslake, Rolla, Farmington and Groundbirch.

The MAML will monitor air quality for two to four weeks in those places, which are each hotbeds of criticism against the way the gas industry does business.

While the Ministry of Energy, Mines, and Petroleum Resources (MEMPR) claims no knowledge of air quality issues in those areas, Peace River South MLA and Energy Minister Blair Lekstrom noted in a press release the importance of monitoring air quality throughout the province.