STORY CONTINUES BELOW THESE SALTWIRE VIDEOS

There’s still a way to go to achieve the huge hayfield with a couple of outdoor winter hockey rinks talked about more than five years ago.

That’s the way a former vice-president of AltaGas described in an October 2016 interview what the Alton Gas river site at Fort Ellis in Colchester County would look like after the natural gas storage project was decommissioned.

In 2016, Charles Lyons downplayed lasting environmental effects at the two Colchester County sites that the Alton Natural Gas Storage company, a subsidiary of AltaGas, planned to use for its multi-million-dollar underground gas storage project.

Lyons said at the time that the brining operation planned for the Fort Ellis site would run for only two to three years, pumping Shubenacadie River water 12 kilometres through a pipeline to flush out huge underground salt caverns at a Brentwood Road site.

“This whole operation is short-term, we are not going to be discharging brine for 50 years or 60 years,” Lyons said.

After years of sputtering between project starts and stops amid consistent opposition from environmentalists and the Mi’kmaq community at the river site and concerned property owners near the cavern site, the company announced in October that the project would be terminated without a smidgen of salt brine discharged from the river and not a single cavern carved out.

In its decision to decommission the project, the company cited a repositioning to natural gas projects on the west coast of Canada and in the United States and a 2020 financial review that determined the project would be “economically challenged.”

The economically challenged project has already cost the company in the range of $75 million, with an estimated $130 million allotted several years back to cover the project’s first phase that included the river brining operation and the development of the caverns.

In December, the company unveiled a detailed decommissioning plan that it has submitted to the Nova Scotia government with an overall approach to “remove above-ground structures, leave buried components in the ground and reclaim land to equivalent land capability.”

The plan included a public feedback phase with a deadline of Jan. 25 for the public to make submissions to the company.

Lori MacLean, spokeswoman for Alton Gas, said Friday that there hasn’t been “a great deal of formal feedback” as of yet and that the company is not commenting on the nature of any feedback received.

The company plan says that pending regulatory approval to proceed, the “decommissioning and reclamation activities of the project” are proposed to start this spring and to be completed by year’s end. The decommissioning process follows a project abandonment plan created for a 2007 environmental assessment process. 

The project consists of several linked components. The 16-hectare site (roughly the size of 40 football fields) on the Shubenacadie River estuary at Fort Ellis consists of two buildings, a large pumphouse and a smaller electrical building, a channel dug in 2014 to divert river water, a replacement dike on leased Crown land, a gabion wall for water intake, two storage ponds (the potential hockey rinks to which Lyons had alluded) and buried piping.

The company decommissioning plan would salvage equipment, dismantle and remove the buildings, drain the ponds and regrade the land under the buildings and at the ponds to be consistent with surrounding conditions.

Components of the gabion wall above the high-water mark will be removed and the elevated dike will remain in place. The diversion channel, already infilling naturally, will remain and the company maintains that the development of a salt marsh in the abandoned channel is an asset for reclaiming the site.

Piping and valves buried at a depth of more than 1.2 metres below the surface will remain abandoned in place and pipes that are above that depth will be removed.

The goal of the first phase of the project was to draw nearly 10,000 cubic metres of water daily from the estuary and propel it through a 12-kilometre underground pipeline to the cavern site on Brentwood Road. There, the water would be pumped nearly 850 metres underground to flush out the salt beds to build the huge storage caverns. The residue salt brine would be piped back to the estuary site for release into the river system, a gradual discharge of 1.3 million cubic metres of salt over a two- to three-year period.

The decommissioning plan is to abandon in place the dual 12-kilometre pipelines between sites, except where prohibited by landowner agreement.

“Regarding the project assets, including lands, a process is to be established for their disposition as part of the decommissioning process." - Lori MacLean, spokeswoman for Alton Gas

The Alton Gas-owned cavern site consists of 80 hectares, five times the size of the river site, in a residential area on Brentwood Road. The Alton property has been partially developed for cavern development, three wells have been drilled but no cavern development has occurred.

A building site surrounded by a chain-link fence contains a building with industrial, mechanical and electrical equipment, a nitrogen generator and compressor, three large water tanks and a brine storage tank.

The decommissioning plan is to salvage the equipment but leave the building, concrete pad and fencing on the site for future use, remove the water tanks and generator and to remove any piping that is known to be buried less than 1.2 metres below the surface.

The company has committed to consult with the Nova Scotia Utilities and Review Board to develop a decommissioning plan for the wells.

That still leaves the future of large parcels of land at both the cavern and river sites in doubt.

“Regarding the project assets, including lands, a process is to be established for their disposition as part of the decommissioning process,” MacLean said.

The Mi’kmaq community that has opposed the project for years would like to see the land at the river site transferred to them and residents near the cavern site would like to see that land used for something along the lines of a green energy project that would benefit the community.

The project included clearing a right of way for a 10-kilometre natural gas pipeline to connect the cavern site with the Maritimes and Northeast Pipeline transmission system but the pipe for that connection was never laid.

The decommissioning plan, informed and refined through engagement with public stakeholders, provincial and federal regulatory agencies and the Nova Scotia's Mi'kmaq community, will require provincial government approval.

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