Always growing: The science behind boreal forest reclamation in Canada

KEY POINTS

• Surmont Regional Residence Stockpile is home to an ongoing environmental research project with the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology
• Interim soil stockpile serves as a proving ground for reforestation techniques, methods
• Reforested stockpile will be used as source of soil, woody plant material and plant propagules when final reclamation occurs in 40-plus years

BY GUS MORGAN

While leading a 2021 tour of the Surmont Boreal Forest Reclamation Project, ConocoPhillips Environmental Operations Supervisor Robert Albricht noticed a First Nations community member pluck a pin cherry from a fruit-laden branch and pop it in her mouth.

To Albricht, the stakeholder and pin cherry interaction symbolized a key milestone along the path to environmental success, a sign that disturbed forest land can be restored to a self-sustaining natural habitat.

“It was from a species we hadn’t even planted on the stockpile,” Albricht said, surmising the native tree had likely sprouted from a seed passed by a bird that had stopped to perch or forage among deadwood placed on the site.

Adding woody material to a reclamation site — deadwood such as logs, branches and stumps — is just one of the many reforestation techniques being analyzed at the Surmont Regional Residence (SRR) Stockpile, the site of the reclamation project.

ConocoPhillips, in collaboration with the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology’s (NAIT) Center for Boreal Research, uses the 8-hectare SRR soil stockpile like a giant outdoor laboratory to test and refine forest reclamation practices and techniques.

When the site's final reclamation occurs decades from now, ConocoPhillips will use this reforested soil stockpile as a source of soil, coarse woody material and plant propagules.  

Surmont operates on the traditional territories of Indigenous communities, and tours of the SRR stockpile, as well as two other Surmont reclamation areas — a 15-hectacre borrow pit and decommissioned pilot plant — give ConocoPhillips' environmental experts like Albricht a chance to update stakeholders on the reclamation and research initiatives in place, as well as receive feedback and engage in meaningful conversation. 

"We're able to continue building trust with the community," he said, "by showing them that we are on track with the reclamation commitments we've made."

Some of the reclamation techniques being trialed at Surmont, many borrowed from the forestry and mining industries, include the rough-and-loose method, pocket plantings, live staking, hitchhiker plugs and lunchbox technologies.

Soil compaction is an obstacle when it comes to restoring a decommissioned well site or facility, and trying to reclaim such a site without decompacting soils can lead to failure. Thus, the need for what’s known as the rough-and-loose method, where operators use heavy equipment to loosen the soil.

While a rough-and-loose site can appear unsightly, the technique gets boreal forest reclamation sites back on track quickly. This method results in topographic variety, creating microclimates that foster plant diversity, making the site more resilient to droughts, floods and fires.

The rough-and-loose method stands in stark contrast to how reclamation work has been done in the past by upstream oil and gas companies. Historically, operators would reclaim a disturbed forest area by making the ground perfectly smooth, coating it with a layer of topsoil before seeding it with grass. The result was something resembling a golf course, meadow or cattle pasture farm plot. While such reclamation work would meet regulatory requirements, it resulted in a prairie-type environment instead of a forest.

ConocoPhillips Remediation & Liability Coordinator Glenn Ball said reclamation success hinges on properly preparing a site for revegetation, which is why ConocoPhillips advocates the rough-and-loose method on forested sites. 

While heavy machinery such as track hoes and bulldozers can use their buckets or blades, respectively, to roughen the soil like was originally done on the Surmont soil stockpile in 2015, ConocoPhillips subsequently discovered that a ripper implement attached to a bulldozer, known as the McNabb RipPlow, does a better job of lifting and decompacting soil without mixing the soil layers. In addition to trialing this tool at Surmont, ConocoPhillips has successfully used the implement at its Montney asset, an unconventional resource play in northeastern British Columbia.

“Everybody's getting on board with it,” Ball said. “They're seeing the upside to this method. We're reclaiming the temporary disturbances we've caused in our two main asset areas with it.”

Implementation

The ConocoPhillips Construction Management Team has been instrumental in establishing the research trials at Surmont and also in ensuring these rough-and-loose practices are being adopted. Civil Construction Superintendent Aaron Arnold has found the techniques not only apply to end-of-life reclamation but also provide business value at the front end.

“It’s not just reclamation at end of life but implementing techniques such as the McNabb Plow on temporary work areas required to support new facilities at the time of initial construction helps reduce front end environmental engineering considerations as well as the installation, maintenance and disposal of engineered erosion and sediment control products," he said. "These innovations are leading to better outcomes while reducing the capital and operational costs of the future.”

Supplemental techniques

ConocoPhillips’ primary method of replanting a boreal forest is to use tree and shrub seedlings from nursery stock, but it augments such plantings with other reclamation techniques.

One such technique is called pocket planting, where a track hoe scoops a bucketful of native plants out of the adjacent forest and then replants it in the disturbed area. Another technique is called live staking. In this process, workers collect certain tree species, like willows and balsam poplar, that root readily when their stems are shoved into the ground.

Hitchhiker plugs are another unique innovation. For this, two plant species are sown together in a single container, known as a plug. One plant gets a free ride, resulting in a two-for-one delivery of plants in the field.

“Through trial and error,” Albricht said, “we discovered all of these different combinations, so for the cost of one plug, you're actually getting two plants.”

Another innovation is a concept called lunchbox. In this technique, plugs are packed with slow-release nutrients. In turn, this feeds the plant “a lunch” that lasts a significant amount of time, enabling the plant to establish strong roots and give it a boost over any competition it encounters.

Weed control without herbicides

At Surmont, ConocoPhillips obtained a regulatory waiver that enabled them to use native plants as the control mechanism to keep noxious weeds from spreading off site and into the surrounding forest instead of controlling them with herbicides.

“Native plants are more successful at establishing themselves over time,” Albricht said. “We're seeing the relative abundance of the non-native species slowly dropping out of the plant community year after year after year without having to introduce herbicide active-ingredient chemicals into the environment.”

ConocoPhillips Remediation & Liability Coordinator Gerard Testa said using herbicides for weed control is a historical agricultural practice, so getting regulators to see it was an unnecessary step in forest reclamation was a challenge.

“The boreal forest is very effective at re-establishing more boreal forest,” Testa said. “We just have to let the boreal forest do its thing and get out of its way.”

NAIT partnership advances reclamation research

The research at Surmont is led by Professor Amanda Schoonmaker, NAIT’s Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Industrial Research Chair for Colleges in Boreal Reclamation and Reforestation.

“The Surmont stockpile project is several years old now,” she said. “By doing best practices out there, we’re demonstrating how well things can actually recover. We planted it to different densities to see how fast the forest canopy would develop, and we’ve been monitoring vegetation development since then. We actually have full canopy closure in some parts of the site.”

Patience is a virtue when it comes to reforestation.

“You don't just press a button and get a forest instantly,” she said. “You need to give it the time to develop. Know what's important to growing a forest and then do that and stop touching it. Let it do its thing.”

Schoonmaker is eager to see how one of the newer Surmont studies, involving topsoil placement depths, plays out. In this study, which started in 2021 and is located on a 15-hectare borrow pit, NAIT researchers are monitoring how a reclaimed area develops over time when topsoil is placed at normal amounts, minimal amounts or none at all.

ConocoPhillips’ long-term collaboration with NAIT has been the ideal partnership, she said, enabling the collection of high-quality quantitative data, the testing of innovative reclamation techniques and supporting the student experience.

Each summer, college and university students rotate through the site to help with the research, gaining hands-on field experience before returning to their respective regions to share their knowledge and experiences.

“This year, we’re doing another round of insect surveys,” she said, “so students will be looking at the diversity of spiders, ants and beetles.”

2023 NAIT Distinguished Industry Partner Award

ConocoPhillips Canada is the proud recipient of the 2023 Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) Distinguished Industry Partner Award, presented to an organization that has shown an ongoing commitment to NAIT and played a critical role in supporting NAIT’s vision and mandate. Since 1983, ConocoPhillips Canada has donated nearly $2 million in funding towards NAIT’s applied research projects, as well as power engineering and geoscience programs at the polytechnic. Most recently, that funding has included support for the Power Engineering Technology program and the ConocoPhillips Canada Surmont Boreal Forest Reclamation Project.