BCBusiness

34 BCBusiness dECEMBER/JAnuARy 2018 Montney shale formation's prolic oil and gas reserves yield bonus liquids such as propane and butane. "The Montney is that big a reserve that it could produce eight to 10 billion cubic feet of gas [daily] for 100 years," Bumstead says. All of this activity is bringing thou- sands of well-paid workers to Dawson Creek, a community of about 13,000. For the ever-smiling Mayor Bumstead, a third-generation resident and a retired Insurance Corp. of British Columbia executive, accommodating the in‡ux is a good problem to have following a rough couple of years for the enerˆy business. After meeting me at Fort St. John air- port the previous afternoon, Bumstead drives us 75 kilometres south along the route of the Alaska Highway, built by U.S. troops during the Second World War. Outside Dawson Creek we stop at the Tower processing plant, one of three local facilities that Calgary-based Encana is building and expanding with limited partnership Veresen Midstream to the tune of $2.5 billion. To shield against the co˜ee-coloured mud that signals spring breakup in the Peace, wood pallets cover the road to the sprawling site, whose spires rise above a neighbouring cow pasture. (The Tower plant is now open, and Pembina Pipeline Corp. of Calgary has since acquired Veresen Inc.) The Peace sometimes feels more Alberta than B.C., partly thanks to its prairie terrain and farming. Dawson Creek is the service hub for a thriving agriculture industry that specializes in crops like wheat, canola and eld peas. Grain elevators stand next to the railway tracks running alongside main drag Alaska Avenue, home to many of the city's 920-odd hotel rooms. On one drive, Bumstead points out RVs inhabited by enerˆy workers, even with tempera- tures still dipping to –15 C at night. "Our hotel rooms are full, the restaurants are full, rental accommodations are full," he says. Bumstead's grandfather moved to the Peace from Saskatchewan in the early 1940s to homestead. An entrepreneur, he bought a sawmill in Fort Nelson. One day in October 1958, he was brushing the snow off the machinery when his hand slipped and turned on the planer. "His mitt gets caught in the planer and pulls his arm in and cuts his arm o˜ to his elbow," Bumstead says. There's a much stronger emphasis on safety when we visit the local o¦ce of ARC Resources Ltd., a Calgary-based oil and gas producer that employs 90 people in Dawson Creek. Ron Toly, ARC's man- ager of eld operations for northeast B.C., explains that operating costs in the Mont- ney are much lower than elsewhere. For example, it costs ARC about $3.6 million to establish a gas well there, versus $9.2 for producers in the Appalachian region of the U.S. "It's the liquids driving the bus, and the low operating costs," says Toly, who wears a hoodie and ball cap. Donning ©ire-retardant red jump- suits, steel-toe boots and other safety gear, Mayor Bumstead and I jump into Toly's pickup and head out to an ARC oil drilling rig. In a portable across from the rig, a towering structure dangling 4,000 metres of segmented drill pipe, a com- puter screen shows a 3«D map of the well. Warren Schnedar, drilling superinten- dent, operations, outlines the process: drill straight down through the Montney shale, then open a horizontal hole as long as 2,500 metres. Once the pipe comes out, "the whole thing will be cemented on the outside all the way to the surface" before completion, Schnedar says. Next stop: an ARC comple- tion site where hydraulic frac- turing, or fracking, for oil is underway, with help from 14 roaring 2,200- horsepower pumps housed in tractor trailers. "We're opening the formation up—by millimetres, of course—and then we're putting sand and water in there, so that when the formation closes on itself again, it can't seal o˜," says completion superintendent Sam Tschetter. 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 2018 rank 2017 rank Pitt MeaDoWs PORt COqUitlaM CHilliWaCk MaPlE RiDgE surrey NaNaiMO CoQuitlaM abbOtSFORD/MiSSiON Vernon COURtENay ParksVille CaMPbEll RiVER commUniTy best citi for work IN B.C. Bumstead downplays fears about fracking's environmental impact. "we all want responsible resource development," he says. "That's the key for not only our communities, our residents and our future generations, but in my view, anyway, it's not being done in a haphazard, unsafe manner." 7 11 23 12 13 25 14 19 22 21 29 24

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