Sackville town councillors may have been hoping to negotiate a better deal before allowing Petroworth Resources Inc. access to an 18-kilometre tract of land within the Sackville basin, but the company says it no longer plans to explore for natural gas on the town-owned property.
Petroworth president Neal Mednick said on Friday his company has decided to abandon its original plan to test for natural gas deposits within the municipal boundaries, instead focusing on the other 70 kilometres of privately-owned property within the basin but outside of town limits.
The reason, he said, is simple.
“We feel that if a program as innocuous as seismic activity is going to meet with this much opposition, then what in the world is going to happen if we apply to drill?”
Mednick said Petroworth is not interested in searching for fuel deposits in a community so seemingly opposed to the drilling process.
In July, council shot down Petroworth’s request to conduct seismic testing within the municipally-owned boundaries of the Sackville Basin in the search for oil or natural gas, citing concerns over the environmental risks that could come later on from the drilling and extraction process.
However, a month later, councillors reversed their decision after they learned the company would still be able to move ahead with testing and drilling on the other properties (for which they had obtained landowner agreements) surrounding the town boundary and that, because they had denied Petroworth’s request, they would have minimal protection for their own municipal water system.
So council agreed to grant Petroworth permission to conduct the seismic testing, if the Toronto-based company agreed to specific conditions, including one which would have ensured baseline testing be conducted on the town’s water wells before and after any drilling were to occur.
The town’s concerns stem from the reported risks that have been associated with hydraulic fracturing (also known as hydrofracking), a process that is sometimes used during the production stage to extract the natural gas from shale deposits underground.
During this process, gas and oil companies pump fluid – usually a mix of water, sand and chemical additives – down the well bore under high pressure to prop open the fractures and force the gas out.
Mednick argued the province of New Brunswick has seen dozens of successful fractures over the years, one of them done by his company south of Moncton.
In fact, he said, hydraulic fracturing has been taking place for over a decade in the province and, of the 65 oil and natural gas wells drilled since 2000, two-thirds have involved hydrofracking.
“This is a pretty routine activity by the industry. It has been, for years, an effective and safe practice,” he said. “And if hydraulic fracturing were to be banned, then essentially you'd just be shutting the industry down in New Brunswick."
Mednick said there have never been any actual documented cases of contamination from fracking but the oil industry is continually having to battle against misinformation and misrepresentation from the public and the media, such as documentary films like Gasland.
“I think people need to be better educated,” he said.
Mednick said he expects his crew to begin shooting the seismic program in the Sackville basin within the next three to four weeks. The 2-D testing will involve drilling hundreds of nine-inch holes into the ground and then detonating dynamite underground to access the necessary data. It would then take several months for a geophysicist to interpret the data that was accumulated during the testing.
