So you have a deck in front of you. Slide 2 actually shows what we are going to talk about quickly. It is an overview of what we know about aquifers in Canada, the key aquifers, the large ones. As Mark said, we have identified 30 that we're studying in great detail, but there are literally hundreds of aquifers in Canada. We'll focus on the regional picture.
We'll talk briefly about what we need to add to our understanding to achieve this goal of sustainable management and sustainable use of groundwater resources, and then give you a snapshot of what the groundwater studies are that we've been doing, which are pertinent to the Alberta situation. Several of the questions you've already raised. I hope we'll come back to that particular topic.
Slide 3 shows the graph of Canada. It shows the map of Canada with key hydrogeological regions in Canada. Precipitation patterns and geography control some of that. Marked on there are a bunch of circles that show the generalized location of the 30 aquifers we've identified as key.
All 30 of these aquifers have had a preliminary assessment where we've looked at whatever existing data there is about the aquifers and we've tried to assess what we can tell about those aquifer systems. This data, of course, is a bit spotty. It was collected by different people in different times and different eras, but it does give us a preliminary sense of where the aquifers are, how they work, and what the geology is.
We're systematically going through these trying to do a much more complete assessment. I'll show you a summary of a couple of pages of what is in that more complete assessment, but the ones we have completed on here are marked in green. The ones we have yet to do are still a white circle.
Twelve have been assessed in greater detail, and we're trying to understand the groundwater availability, the dynamics of the aquifer; as you've already heard, water is constantly in motion and the real challenge of some of these aquifers is understanding those dynamics—it's not so much just locating where they are—and the potential vulnerabilities of those aquifers to contamination or disturbance or overuse.
As Mark said, we are accelerating our efforts to do this. We had thought we would try to finish these by 2030 with the resources we had. We've now taken five years off that schedule by allocating more resources to this, so we're taking steps to try to move faster because we certainly recognize how important this is to Canadians. About 10 million Canadians depend on groundwater as the potable water supply.
Slide 4 shows what kind of information we can expect from existing aquifers in this preliminary assessment that we've already done of all 30. We know something about the basic geological setting. We know something about the depth and location. This is an interesting issue. A lot of people think aquifers are like underground lakes or underground rivers. They are not. They are probably more akin to something like sponges, where water is distributed everywhere inside them. It is sometimes a real challenge to ask where the boundaries of these things are and where the water is contained.
The other thing about aquifers that people don't appreciate is the time that water takes to move through them. It can range from tens of years to hundreds of years, even thousands of years. So if you cause a disturbance in one part of an aquifer, it may be a long time before you have any knowledge of it occurring someplace else in the aquifer. When you ask how long it takes to study one of these things, if the water movement is hundreds of years, it is a real challenge to figure out what the aquifer is doing in just a couple of years of study.
We also know something about withdrawal rates, because most of the information we have about existing aquifers comes from existing water wells. These were drilled by individuals, often, or corporations, or by different companies. They don't have consistent records or always complete records, but we do have some information about what is happening.
We know, in many cases, the basic water chemistry. Actually, I think we can say that Canada is quite fortunate that the water quality of groundwater is, for the most part, excellent in many places.
We know something about the probable recharge and discharge areas. So we know how water gets into the aquifers in a general sense and we know something about how it comes out.
But that's about it. That's an overview summary.
This is a preliminary assessment, so there's quite a bit known. If you look at slide 5, though, what we really want to do is try to understand how the aquifer functions. This is a whole different question. We need to be a lot more systematic about understanding the dimensions of the aquifer, where the water is, how it's moving, and what the particular draws on the water might be from different places where people are withdrawing it.
Here is a list--I'm not going to go through it--that shows, in comparison to previous lists, that much more comprehensive data is needed. One of the problems that we've certainly had in Canada is that the history of studying groundwater has been scattered among a whole bunch of jurisdictions. People do things differently in different places, and one of the activities we're certainly going to take is to try to consolidate and coordinate some of that so we have much more consistent and comprehensive information.
Slide 6 reiterates that point. This is definitely a collaborative effort. We often work very closely with the provinces and municipalities to try to get, between us, all the information we need. Often the federal government doesn't have much of the information. It's really the provinces that have the management responsibilities, and often the municipalities that have a lot of the detailed information.
So we work quite hard at a collaboration to make sure everybody is sharing information and we all know what it means. Collectively, in doing this, we're establishing common approaches.
One of the real strengths of this program is due to Dr. Rivera. His vision sort of came out in 2001 that we needed to have a very comprehensive way of doing this and that everybody should be doing it roughly the same way, because water does move. It's our only natural resource that crosses boundaries all the time. If you have different approaches on two different sides of a boundary, then you've got incompatible data and you can't even begin to make policy.
The other thing we're doing as part of this program, which I think is key, is trying to create a groundwater information network. This is a completely distributed database system. Nobody holds all the information, but it's all accessible by everybody else. We're not trying to amass everything into a huge database; we're just trying to say that if it's available, then everybody should be able to get the information they need whenever they need it. It's really a question of linking things together.
Slide 7, I understand, is one of your primary interests--some of the aquifer systems in Alberta. Because aquifers are more like sponges than they are like lakes, it's actually very hard to depict them on maps, so this is a very schematic map. It shows the general locations of some of the key aquifers in Alberta. Of course, there are many more than are shown on here, but these are some of the ones we've identified as part of our list. I'll take you through the list starting at the top.
The Paskapoo sandstones is one of the major aquifers in Alberta. It sort of runs between Calgary and Edmonton. This is a primary focus of the Alberta Geological Survey and the Alberta environment department, because this supplies an awful lot of water to population centres in Alberta. This is something we just completed an assessment of with the Alberta groups, so it's now fairly complete.
The second thing we're focusing on now is the buried valley aquifers, which is “BV” on this graphic. These are paleovalleys. They are actually valleys that existed at one time but were since infilled by sediment. Because there were sediments put into these things--sediments are more porous, and let water run through them--the valleys still take a lot of water through them, but they're buried underneath the rock.
These are actually best thought of as a bunch of channels that run across the region and they're quite large in area of extent. This is of particular interest around the oil sands because they occupy a lot of the same area, as you can see.
This is something we're currently working on with Alberta and Saskatchewan, because these buried paleovalleys actually extend to Saskatchewan, and I believe some of them extend into Manitoba. They're quite large areas, and we're in discussions right now with Alberta and Saskatchewan about how they're best studied. They are huge systems and we can't understand the whole thing, but we want to understand the critical parts of it. We should complete the assessment of that aquifer system by about 2012.
There are three other sets of aquifers marked on the map, which currently aren't on our schedule to do in the next three years. They'll be prioritized in a different way. We still feel they're important, but they're not as critical in terms of timeliness as the buried paleovalleys.
We'd be remiss if we didn't mention our Alberta colleagues. They have a fairly proactive and forward-looking groundwater strategy that they started in 2007. They have started a 10-year plan to understand groundwater across the province. Their aquifer mapping process and progress is completely compatible with what we're doing. As we complete this inventory of 30, what they'll be doing in their program will add to that inventory and potentially speed up our access to completing all 30. The first area they are really focusing on is more in the Edmonton-Calgary corridor, but they're doing an awful lot of work around the oil sands as well, as I'm sure you're quite aware.
In summary of where we are with our program, as Mark said, we believe groundwater is a critical resource, and we're trying to get the information into people's hands so they can make sustainable management decisions. Lack of information is the real problem. We're doing this collectively with everybody who has a stake in groundwater management in Canada, because we really think collective leadership is what's going to allow us to have comprehensive, consistent data across the country. Our ultimate goal is that people do assessments of aquifers in a way in which information can be shared and contained. One of our challenges is that they do connect with surface water. They do connect across boundaries, including boundaries with the United States. Having a comprehensive database allows much more sound policy decisions.
At this point, we'd be quite happy to try to answer your questions.
