Using multiple data sources to assess whether oil and gas activities have affected water resources in a Western Canada watershed
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A multidisciplinary environmental project was conducted between 2019 and 2024 to assess the potential impacts of industrial activities and, in particular, oil and gas (O&G) development, in the Fox Creek area (Alberta, Western Canada). Fox Creek was selected because this region has been intensively developed for hydrocarbons over the past 60 years, first for conventional resources, then for unconventional shale gas which involves hydraulic fracturing. The various components of the project included geological, shallow and deep geophysical, geomechanical, geochemical, hydrogeological, as well as air photos and remote sensing studies, which fed into each other. The study area covers 700 km2 and is mainly forested. Despite its small size, it includes over 800 O&G historical and producing wells and 2,300 km of seismic lines. The regional shallow aquifer is the Paleogene Paskapoo Formation, a fluvial unit comprising meter to decameter-thick sandstone-fill channels cut into a mudstone, siltstone and shale continental plain succession that also includes coal seams. By its very nature, this formation is highly heterogeneous and consequently exhibits a wide range of hydraulic conductivities and yields. The aim of this project was to study an industrial region holistically, from the surface to the gas-rich unit using both direct and indirect data, in order to obtain different lines of evidence for assessing cumulative effects.The variable hydraulic properties of the Paskapoo Formation are due to both its architecture and diagenesis. The latter has led to the development of preferential pathways in poorly consolidated sandstone-fill channels with irregularly distributed, meter-thick, highly calcite-cemented sandstone beds. The dissolution / cementation events have formed a framework which controls flow in conjunction with the fracture network mainly consisting of bedding planes. Data/results from water levels, yields, estimated vertical recharge, petrophysical analyses, borehole geophysics and geochemistry indicated that a significant portion of the water flowing through the watershed originates from the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, a mountain range located approximately 150 km to the southwest. The integrated results of geology, hydrogeology and geomechanics have shown that the aquifer's vulnerability to both surface and deep activities is low. Indeed, geochemistry revealed no impact on surface or groundwater quality. Nevertheless, the study of landscape evolution over time revealed that around 36% of forests have disappeared in the past few decades in the study area, while another study revealed that there may be significant differences between the various water budget components in undisturbed and disturbed (e.g. seismic lines) areas, including a decrease in aquifer recharge in disturbed areas. This project has shown that, although the quality of water resources does not seem to be affected, probably largely due to the favorable geological/hydrogeological context, human activities do have an impact on the water resource apportionment, affecting, among other things, vegetation and notably its recovery in disturbed areas.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".