Responsibility
Water is an essential and precious natural resource. Progress Energy embraces water’s fundamental value and uses rigorous conservation and protection practices throughout its operations to reduce the risk of adverse impacts to water sources. We continuously strive to improve our environmental performance and work with communities, governments and environmental groups to develop sustainable water management approaches for natural gas development—an approach that is embedded in the intent of our Environment, Health and Safety Policy and Commitment PDF
For more than 50 years, hydraulic fracturing (known as ‘fracing’) has helped release oil and gas from surrounding formations and improve well production. Fracing involves high pressure injection of a water and sand mixture through the wellbore and into the reservoir. Shale gas development uses relatively more water in the fracing process because the carbon-bearing shale formations thousands of metres underground need significantly more stimulation to help the natural gas flow out from the tight rock layers.
Progress is currently advancing its shale gas development plans for the Montney formation in northeast British Columbia. Although the amount of fresh water used in natural gas development is a small fraction of the total available water in the area, we recognize it is a finite resource so every drop counts. As our shale gas activities increase, we constantly seek ways to responsibly source water for our fracing processes, to reduce fresh water use and to protect groundwater from being affected by our operations. Progress meets these challenges using these key strategies: