Land

Finding and producing oil and natural gas involves many activities: conducting seismic, building roads and drilling pads, mining oilsands, laying pipelines and constructing production facilities. These activities directly affect the land and the people who live on it by:

• altering wildlife habitats
• disturbing landscapes, soils, native vegetation, and heritage resources
• contaminating lands through spills of oil, gas, diesel or salty produced water

Industry shares the use of land with other stakeholder interests, including the forestry and mining industries, grazing, recreational users and those who want protection for wildlife habitat. At times, development provides benefits such as employment and improved access to remote communities.

Land use

The industry’s goal is to lighten its environmental footprint on the land. The industry does this in different ways.

• land- and resource-use planning and management
  The industry is engaged in government-led integrated land and resource management initiatives in the Northwest Territories, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and offshore Atlantic Canada. These initiatives are an important means of sustainably managing the environment and coordinating land uses while ensuring that socio-economic benefits flow to local communities, publicly owned natural resources generate revenues for provinces and industry receives the certainty and predictability needed to make well-informed business decisions.
  
  
• coordination among industrial land users
  Oil and gas and forestry companies are increasingly looking for ways to coordinate their land use activities to save money and reduce environmental impacts. For example, the Alberta Chamber of Resources’ Integrated Land Management Program brings together different resource industries to coordinate development plans and share best practices, with the goal of improving efficiencies and reducing environmental impacts. To date the program has helped the sectors reduce their cumulative impacts through research, planning and building shared roads and coordinating development so that forestry cut blocks overlap with areas where oil and gas companies intend to explore and develop.
  
  
• drilling technology
  Canada’s upstream oil and gas industry leads the world in directional and horizontal drilling. This technology allows many wells to be drilled from a single site, reducing the number of roads, power lines and pipelines needed to serve the site, and the amount of land that eventually needs to be reclaimed. It also allows the province to lease mineral rights in environmentally sensitive areas with no surface access.
  
  
• low-impact seismic technologies
  The industry also applies low-impact seismic technologies to find oil and gas reserves in environmentally sensitive terrains. These include using existing trails and transporting crews and equipment to remote sites by helicopter. Another approach is the use of “meandering lines,” narrower, non-linear seismic lines. These reduce access to sensitive wildlife habitats by predators and humans and help to avoid adverse effects on vegetation and wildlife.
  
  
• operating practices
  Before drilling is carried out, companies explore opportunities to avoid sensitive ecosystems or time construction and other activities for periods when wildlife and habitats are less at risk. In environmentally sensitive or boggy areas, the industry often uses mats or snow roads to prevent damage to the land.