Feature Stories
Surmont, located in northeastern Alberta, is surrounded by boreal forest.
KEY POINTS
- ConocoPhillips works with a variety of organizations and third parties to minimize impacts to the land and ensure the well-being and safety of staff at its Surmont oil sands operations in northeastern Alberta, Canada.
- Surmont is located on crown land. This land is managed by the Canadian government, which issues permits to use parts of the forest for oil and gas development and timber harvest.
- While the Surmont facility belongs to ConocoPhillips, the forest surrounding it does not. Alberta Pacific Forest Industries (Al-Pac) has the rights to the timber on Alberta’s largest Forest Management Area, which includes Surmont.
- Collaboration with Al-Pac contributes to the safety of the Surmont facility and workforce while achieving efficient land use and reducing overall disturbance.
BY KATE MACCOMB
Surmont is one of many business operations within Alberta’s largest Forest Management Area in the north of the province, and ConocoPhillips works closely with Al-Pac to ensure a thoughtful and effective approach to land management in this forested area.
“ConocoPhillips was at the forefront of adopting an integrated approach to working with Al-Pac by collaborating on the planning for Surmont 1 in the early 2000s, and that collaboration has continued," said Peter Koning, senior director of sustainable development, who previously led the Alberta Chamber of Resources Integrated Land Management (ILM) initiative. ILM is a key strategy of Alberta’s Land Use Framework to ensure users coordinate their activities to achieve efficient land use. “Through this approach, we can manage and reduce overall disturbance on the landscape in close collaboration between Al-Pac and businesses in the area.”
ILM aims to reduce land-use disturbances relative to what would occur in the absence of integrated efforts. In this case, two crown land users coordinated their plans to achieve this goal. In addition to minimizing overall disturbance, ILM can lead to more effective operations management and cost savings for those involved. Successful implementation hinges on establishing a clear business agreement that outlines each party’s responsibilities.
Through this approach, Al-Pac takes on all the planning, consultation and execution aspects of timber harvesting at Surmont; 771 hectares will be harvested. As a result, they meet their wood supply quotas in accordance with their Forest Management Agreement conditions, and ConocoPhillips provides site access, including preexisting roads, to reduce the overall land disturbance.
“We’ve been working closely with Al-Pac to sign an agreement through which we can integrate our future planned footprint into their Spatial Harvest Sequence (a mapping of forest areas selected for harvest within a decade), while ensuring timber harvesting operations are safely performed and wildfire risk is reduced,” said Vince Boden, senior surface land agent, who works closely alongside Al-Pac.
Reclamation efforts
In the summer of 2025, Al-Pac plans to plant about 15,000 conifer seedlings, which along with the natural growth of the deciduous seedlings, will put the harvested areas on a self-sustaining trajectory to boreal forest. In total, Al-Pac manages more than 15.8 million acres of Alberta’s forests.
ILM operations were set to take place on the Surmont lease several years from now. Following the devastating 2016 wildfires in Fort McMurray — and with a recent pattern of dry summers in western Canada — harvesting timber on selective areas of the asset has become increasingly important.
With this in mind, ILM operations were expedited to June 2024 to provide defenses to protect Surmont during the wildfire season by reducing the fuel loads on the landscape.
"This will be the second time we've done ILM on a big scale at Surmont with Al-Pac,” said Robert Albricht, supervisor, environmental operations. “Following a collaborative approach, we’ve aligned and coordinated our activities with Al-Pac to demonstrate our commitment to ILM and minimize our overall combined footprint.”
A CLOSER LOOK: THE TREES IN CANADA’S BOREAL FOREST
Surmont falls within Canada’s Boreal Forest region, which covers almost 60 percent of the country’s land area. Boreal forests are known for withstanding high-latitude environments where freezing temperatures can occur for six-to-eight months of the year.
Most trees native to the boreal are conifers; these are trees with needle leaves and cones, such as spruce, fir and pine. Broad-leaf deciduous trees, such as trembling aspen, balsam poplar and birch, are also widely distributed across the boreal forest.
At Surmont, and within this forest region in general, you’ll find boreal mixed-wood — a mix of both conifer trees and deciduous trees (those which naturally shed their leaves) — with the latter being the primary focus of Al-Pac harvesting.