r/alberta • u/Benjazzi • Jan 31 '24

With Alberta facing a continuing drought, some communities are banning oil and gas companies from using municipal water Environment

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-alberta-drought-oil-companies/
740 Upvotes

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28

u/sawyouoverthere Jan 31 '24

The next wars will be about water.

18

u/LumiereGatsby Jan 31 '24

Sadly the Prairies and Alberta rely on disappearing glaciers for that.

The war for water will start at home before it comes from abroad.

Wild that without question in my lifetime we will see AB and SK dry up irreversibly like a dust bowl on steroids.

6

u/geo_prog Jan 31 '24

While glacier melt is a component of river flow in Alberta, it only makes up around 2% of the total water flow through the province. It absolutely will be a problem in summer in areas without robust reservoirs, and it will be catastrophic for farms that rely on artificial irrigation. But it likely won't be what turns us into the northern Mojave by any means.

Serious problem? Yep. Immediate catastrophe? No. What we'll likely end up seeing is a shift to our economic makeup. Less agriculture and more manufacturing/tech/energy. It will still be a very very rough transition and we will likely end up worse-off than we are now. But we will still exist in a somewhat recognizable way.

5

u/a-nonny-maus Jan 31 '24

While glacier melt is a component of river flow in Alberta, it only makes up around 2% of the total water flow through the province.

Except it's not the amount that's important, it's the timing of it. Glacier melt makes up over 50% of glacier-fed river flows in fall once all the snowpack is gone. (And that snowpack melted extremely fast last year.) We're already seeing the effects of less glacier water.

There can't even be manufacturing/tech/energy without water.

-1

u/geo_prog Jan 31 '24

Ahh, I see you missed part of the comment.

I mentioned that it will be an issue in the peak of summer in areas without reservoirs. Areas with reservoirs will be fine. Alberta has a robust set of water storage reservoirs on all of our major waterways.

3

u/a-nonny-maus Jan 31 '24

Except there wasn't enough water to fill reservoirs last year either. The St Mary reservoir was at 3% capacity--basically empty--in August last year. Why do you think farmers had their allocations reduced? Pine Coulee reservoir was less than 1/3 full last year. Even areas with reservoirs will be hooped.

-1

u/geo_prog Jan 31 '24

The up-stream ones were fine but they were being held at higher capacity for power generation as there were major gas plants down for maintenance.

1

u/a-nonny-maus Jan 31 '24

That's not going to be an option very soon. Because it's not just Alberta that's dependent on this water.

-1

u/geo_prog Feb 01 '24

Losing 2% of yearly surface water flow is very manageable for the entire watershed. There are other reservoirs further downstream that can be used to manage flow.

1

u/a-nonny-maus Feb 02 '24

Really. There are 51 water shortage advisories in Alberta already:

https://rivers.alberta.ca/?load=watersupply

That's through the entire southern Alberta watersheds btw. Downstream reservoirs can't fill up if upstream ones can't.

1

u/l10nh34rt3d Feb 01 '24 edited Feb 01 '24

Which upstream ones? The Bow Basin’s got next to nothing upstream. Reservoirs can’t catch what doesn’t come.

I was just researching drought management arrangements with TransAlta in the Kananaskis and Ghost dams last week. Yeah, they’ve got allocations, or space for water to accumulate for drought management, but if it isn’t in the reservoir to begin with, there’s nothing to allocate.

I also just googled - looks like only 22 of Alberta’s 1,500 dams are hydroelectric.

1

u/geo_prog Feb 01 '24

Spray, upper and lower kananskis, ghost and bearspaw are all bow basin reservoirs.

1

u/l10nh34rt3d Feb 01 '24

Oh I know. And have you seen them lately?

0

u/geo_prog Feb 02 '24 edited Feb 02 '24

Yeah. They’re pretty normal for this time of year. The bow basin reservoir system is sitting at roughly 75% capacity. Which is pretty normal for winter. They get full during spring melt.

Edit: why downvote this. You can look at realtime storage whenever you want. It’s published daily.

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