Our company has published a fact sheet on water use in shale gas in Quebec. It is on our web page at Questerre.com.
Just to give you a quick summary, we believe that in full-field development at approximately 400 wells per year, which is about the higher end of the range that has been predicted for Quebec, we would be quite a light industrial user of water, using approximately three billion litres of water per year, which would be less than car washes in Quebec, which would be maybe 20% of the water that the city of Quebec loses just through its leaky pipes. It is less than 1% of what agriculture uses. It is less than 1% of what pulp and paper uses.
I understand that when we are talking to people and say we are using 12 million litres of water, people imagine it to be a huge number. It is hard to grasp what the number really is. But in an industrial context, it is actually a small amount of water and will be barely noticed, if at all, on the Quebec water table. MDDEP has already put in regulations restricting us such that if there are local areas of shortage of water, we would be restricted in how much we take. I don’t expect that in the lowlands that would ever be a problem.
In addition, to put it into another context, we have calculated the amount of water it takes for one well and compared it with how many homes the gas from that well would be able to heat or service in one year, if you are on natural gas service. The amount would be less than one litre of water per year per home in Quebec, compared with the current usage in Quebec of 360 litres per home.