Changes coming to stalled project
These days, it’s so quiet at the proposed Alton Gas brining operation site that you can hear the Shubenacadie River run.
That’s exactly the way Colin Hawks likes it.
“The longer it goes on without any work being done, the better the likelihood that it won’t go,” Hawks said Monday afternoon amid a sea of new and used car tires at his automotive repair shop just south of Brookfield.
The property on Brentwood Road where Hawks lives with his wife, Valerie, and operates his business is less than half a kilometre from the Colchester County site where Alton Gas, a subsidiary of Altagas, plans to develop two gigantic underground natural gas storage caverns.
The company intends to draw 10,000 cubic metres of water daily from the Shubenacadie River estuary near Fort Ellis and pump it 12 kilometres to the storage site, where a solution mining process would flush out underground salt to develop two caverns. The diluted brine from the dissolved salt would then be
returned to the river and gradually discharged back into the estuary.
Hawks, his neighbours, environmentalists and members of the Sipekne’katik First Nation have been battling against the project for years.
“With the environment, as far as the way things are going with all businesses to do with oil and gas, they are starting to actually look at some green energy sources instead of just the way it’s always been,” Hawks said. “Things are starting to change. With any luck, some of these projects will end up being dismantled. We can hope. It’s looking better. It’s been long enough now and the tide is turning a little bit on just doing things the way it has always been done.
The project has sputtered, started and stopped many times over the past several years.
The latest setback for the company was a Nova Scotia Supreme Court decision that ordered an additional 120 days of consultation between the province and the Sipekne’katik band regarding the project.
“While there had been extensive consultations regarding the potential environmental impacts of the project, the core issue of aboriginal title and treaty rights was never specifically engaged,” Justice Frank C. Edwards said in his March 24 written decision, overturning a 2016 provincial Environment Department decision to grant a brining operation permit for the project.
The Sipekne’katik band appealed that ministerial decision all the way to the Supreme Court.
A spokeswoman with the provincial Office of Aboriginal Affairs said in an email Monday that the province remains committed to timely and
respectful consultation with Sipekne’katik.
“Consistent with the judicial order, we are working with the Sipekne’katik First Nation to find a mutually agreeable format and timeline for this continued consultation, while recognizing some of the challenges associated with COVID-19,” said Kristen Rector.
MAINTENANCE ONLY
Alton spokeswoman Lori Maclean said the company is abiding by the court decision, which “requires the additional consultation between the Crown and band before project activities can take place.”
“At the river site, only care and maintenance activities have been taking place during this period of time,” Maclean said in an email Monday. “Given the court decision, activity related to brining is not taking place.”
Maclean said Alton welcomes "Mi’kmaw participation in the project, including on long-term environmental protection and economic benefits."
Hawks said “none of the (Alton) permits are valid” longer.
“All of them are outdated.” He said the company never had permits for the 10-kilometre lateral lines that would pipe the stored gas from the cavern site to the Maritimes & Northeast pipeline for distribution to market. The connector pipe would run through wetlands, Hawks said of the plan to clear a 20-metre-wide strip for the length of the pipeline, including a crossing of the Stewiacke River.
“We’ll never let up on them,” Hawks said of the group that opposes the project. “We worked way too hard for what we’ve got. The same with everyone else around here.”
In February, Dale Poulette and Rachael Greenland-smith, a couple who have long opposed the project and had lived at the Fort Ellis site until ordered by the Supreme Court to abandon their straw-bale hut there, held a news conference to say the proposed project contravenes the federal Fisheries Act.
Among federal and provinany cial documents obtained from filing more than 20 freedom of information requests, Poulette and Greenland-smith produced a May 2016 communication filed by Paula Jackman, a toxicology lab supervisor with the federal Environment Department. That communication concluded “for a short period of time any fish in this mixing zone may be exposed to elevated salinity levels above those considered safe for marine and estuarine organisms.”
Jackman stated that “high salinity such as those expected in the brine are considered deleterious substances according to the Fisheries Act.”
Greenland-smith said at the February news conference the 260 parts salt per a thousand parts of water, which is permitted under the 2016 provincial industrial approval for the brining operation, meets the criteria of a deleterious substance.
““This will cause harm to fish and fish habitat, thus affecting the rights of Mi’kmaw people to exercise their treaty rights and it would cause serious harm to the Shubenacadie River and species at risk that frequent that water.”
Maclean said the company has heard the concerns about the project’s environmental impact.
“To this end, we have been evaluating the project and are considering changes that are responsive to stakeholder and First Nations feedback, updated regulatory requirements and evolving best practices as we apply the principles of continuous improvement to project design,” Maclean said.
“Changes being considered will significantly lower salinity concentration at the point of brine release. The project will not release any brine until all regulatory authorizations have been obtained that safeguard the Shubenacadie. We are committed to the ongoing health of the river estuary.”