Public concern about impacts to groundwater is growing and many feel that actions should be taken today to protect groundwater resources into the future. It is often said that we don't know much about groundwater and that much more data needs to be collected.

This webinar address these tough questions: What do we know about groundwater? What is the state of the science of groundwater in Alberta? How can we can make informed decisions? The webinar discusses what information we are missing, and how we can make informed decisions based on the information we have today.

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NOTE: Water Matters would like to thank the board of the Mountain Parks Watershed Association for approving the use of these presentations on our website.

From this Presentation's Question and Answer Session...

Click on a question to view the answer.

Q1. About reclaiming unused wells, are there numbers of how many wells have been reclaimed? Are there guidelines to reclaim wells? What are the effects of not reclaiming unused wells?

Rob George: We don't have accurate numbers on how many wells in Alberta have not been reclaimed. Many wells have been suspended for a number of years that need to be reclaimed. So, in percentage terms, the majority of wells which are not being used right now are just sitting there and haven't been reclaimed. Some have been reclaimed according to the standards that Alberta Environment has. Alberta's Water Ministerial Regulations sets out procedures accepted by the province to safely reclaim wells. People are meant to follow those procedures. Fundamentally, in order to reclaim a well properly, you should be hiring a certified water well driller to do that. They know the different steps that need to be carried out.

David McKenna: This question has come up lots of times that I've had to field. For almost every quarter section there's probably a number of wells that were at some point were active and producing water from which someone walked away and in some instances they may have made an effort to close it. But more often than not it was just abandoned and it still poses a risk as a conduit into the aquifer.

Q2. There are 207 groundwater monitoring wells in Alberta. How many do you estimate we would need to get a fairly complete picture of our groundwater resources within the province?

Rob George: There are approximately 200 actively monitored ambient water wells in the province that Alberta Environmnet uses to monitor natural conditions around the province. That's a very small number of wells because Alberta is a very large area geographically. In many European countries that have higher populations and higher density of groundwater use but smaller areas than Alberta; each individual country in Europe is usually considerably smaller than Alberta. There are 1000s of monitoring wells, 6000 to 10 000 in most European countries. So we have a long ways to go to completely understand the groundwater system in Alberta.

Q3. Do you know to what extent the change in vegetation cover affects the quantity of groundwater? And how it varies by replacing original cover with other types of vegetation of soil cover?

Rob George: The vegetation has quite a lot of impact on the timing, for example, of snow melt. So, if you cut off a forest cover and replace it with grassland, you get more rapid spring runoff. That does reduce the amount of groundwater infiltration. There are other sorts of changes that we know about, but we're unable to measure them accurately. One example is that the groundwater recharges more rapidly through natural grassland cover than it does through areas that are being disturbed by agriculture. Dr Matashi from the University of Calgary is one of the researchers looking at groundwater recharge and how that interacts with vegetation and ecosystems.

Q4. What is being done to develop a database of information regarding groundwater in the Eastern Slopes?

Rob George: We have various databases that we're working on - groundwater information collection systems. For the Eastern Slopes, we're primarily looking at building an Alberta water information system to make sure the groundwater information that we do have is fully available. Eastern Slopes are a bit different from, for example, the Calgary-Edmonton corridor in that the Eastern Slopes have very little development and very few water wells. In the Calgary-Edmonton corridor, there are many thousands of wells. So, we have a lot more information on which to base aquifer mapping and groundwater modelling in the central part of the province. In the Eastern Slopes, we probably have quite a number of years of work to do before we can do any real aquifer mapping or modelling because the density of wells is very low. Some parts of Alberta where there is not very much information are, even though there're very important to the regional groundwater flow system, are not going to be able to be mapped in detail immediately because we don't have the basic information available.

David McKenna: We're provided with some direction based on priority and level of development. So, as we're doing this, we have identified a number of critical areas in the province. South Saskatchewan River Basin is one of the areas of concern. Simply put, the closure of surface water allocations means we know there will be an increase in pressure to access groundwater for industrial processes or agriculture. We have a number of critical focus areas in the province just because of the rate of development, which is where we will be focusing our efforts in the near future. The hope is to have the whole province mapped at some point and establish an aquifer management system for the whole province, which entails modelling. We'll have a better understanding of basin recharge and we'll be able to make better decisions; but, in truth, it's probably a 15 year to 20 year exercise before we'll have accomplished a mapping system from one end of the province to the other.

Q5. Please briefly describe the Aquifer Classification System form and purpose.

Danielle Droitsch: And another linked question is, given you have another 15-20 years to define the system, how do we make decisions in the meantime?

Rob George: That's a complicated question. With the aquifer classification system that we use, there is more than one way to classify the same bundle of groundwater rock and flow system. We have been discussing how we might go about doing this in Alberta. We have done quite a bit aquifer mapping and classification in the past. We will probably use that as a basic model of where to begin. It's the sort of mapping we've done in the water management plan for the Cold-Lake Beaver River Basin. It will be a sort of model for how we classify groundwater in the future. We may also use some different classification methods in addition to that. But that would be the basic method.

Now, the second part of your question. We already have a basis for making decisions about groundwater flow. We do know about how groundwater and surface water interact to some extent from examining the base flow in rivers during the winter months. We do have information about groundwater flow, but it is not as exact as will allow us to do certain modelling. But that doesn't mean we're incapable of making decisions with the information we have. We have lots of information at a local scale - a site-specific scale - from many thousands of individual water licences or individual industrial sites. So we have a good deal of information that, if compiled, can be used to make quite good decisions. Long-term sustainability is not a matter of building one numerical model, getting all the information, and then making a decision forever. Sustainable use of groundwater is always an adaptive management process, where you continue to make decisions. You make decisions based on the best information you have. As that information becomes available, you can make better decisions.

About the Workshop Presenters

Robert George is a hydrogeologist and groundwater specialist with the Environmental Policy Branch of Alberta Environment. Recently he has been involved in the development of an oilfield injection policy for Alberta, development of groundwater policy for coal bed methane (CBM) development, and review of the provincial groundwater monitoring network. Previously he worked in Alberta Environment's Northern Region for several years, where he dealt with groundwater licensing issues, environmental impact assessments, and other groundwater related issues in the northern part of the province.

David McKenna began his diverse career with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and worked on all three of Canada's Oceans. He served as Chair of the Environmental Science Department and instructed within the Renewable Resource Management Program at Holland College, PEI. He was a consultant within the forestry sector in Northern British Columbia, and he spent the last eight years working with Alberta Sustainable Resource Development and more recently with Alberta Environment. Currently, he manages the Industrial/Municipal Policy Sector and leads the Groundwater Management Team.

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