I agree that the biggest challenge we have in Quebec on the public relations front right now is this idea of water contamination. I have been spending a lot of time on the south shore. My objective has been to meet with every mayor on the whole south shore, and I have met probably about 50% of them at this stage.
The conversation in the last six months has changed a lot. The issue of frac chemicals is something that we have published. It has been transparent. All the journalists in Quebec have investigated it and found that we use a very small number of chemicals in shale gas, much less than the number of chemicals we use in conventional fracking. We have 300, 400, or 500 different chemicals that might go into a conventional frac. One thing that makes shale gas inexpensive and competitive is that we use so few chemicals, which is the irony, because people are more worried about it than about conventional fracking. Those kinds of issues don’t seem to be top of mind anymore in Quebec. It is the water contamination from drilling and the potential surface spills that people are concerned about.
The other thing in terms of the water treatment issue--given that we have all the testing, given that we have already treated water at several treatment plants in Quebec--is that in my impression, it is more an issue of municipal-provincial jurisdiction. By not recycling the water, the municipalities are given some local control. That issue of jurisdiction between municipalities and provinces is not necessarily an argument we want to get into too much, but we think the issue of treatment in the lowlands is more about that than it is about the flowback water itself.