Energize Alberta Features

Alberta’s big cities and industrial users looking to conserve water

While there's still work to be done, Alberta's two largest cities and the province's key industries are making substantial progress in water conservation and recycling efforts.

In fact, much of the water that is used in Alberta never really disappears, and Edmonton and Calgary, where more than half of the population lives and works, provide a good example of how that is the case.

In many ways, the water system is much like a closed loop, with the two cities and its most important industries, such as the oil and gas sector, recycling much of what they use—about 85 per cent in the case of the energy sector.

Alberta Environment and Water, which oversees the province's water resources, reports that although the province's population has grown by almost one million, from 2.87 million in 2000 to 3.72 million in 2010, water allocations have only grown by seven per cent in that period, surpassing 9.9 billion cubic metres in 2010.

But allocations are one thing and use is another—the department doesn't actually know how much of that allocation is used.

The vast majority of the province's water, about 42 per cent, is allocated for irrigation in central and southern Alberta, with the oil and gas industry being allocated 7.5 per cent (although another 2.4 per cent is used for drilling and injection). The utility sector accounts for just over 23 per cent, of which almost all is for cooling at coal-fired and gas-fired power plants, while 11.2 per cent is allocated to municipalities.

Big city consumption trending down

Water consumption has actually dropped consistently—and continues to—in Calgary and Edmonton.

Paul Fesko, manager of strategic services for water resources at the City of Calgary, which provides water to 1.1 million people in the city itself, Airdrie, Strathmore and Chestermere, and manages wastewater for those municipalities as well as Cochrane, says water demand has been dropping by about one per cent a year since 1995. He also notes that city council implemented a policy in 2003 called "30 and 30," which aims to reduce consumption by 30 per cent over the next 30 years and is on track to doing so.

Per capita water demand was at 406 litres a day at the end of 2010, with residential demand at 257 litres per capita per day.

The move to adopt an aggressive water conservation plan was necessitated to a large extent by the decision of the provincial government in 2006 to freeze water allocations as part of the South Saskatchewan River Basin water management plan. The South Saskatchewan system, from which the city obtains all of its water, includes the Bow, Elbow and Red Deer rivers.

The city launched a number of initiatives to reduce consumption, including requiring that all residential and commercial customers be metered as opposed to the previous flat-rate system. Now there are only 42,000 residential flat-rate accounts left, and all of those customers will be metered by 2014, Fesko says. All 25,000 commercial customers are now metered.

In addition, all city-owned buildings have been retrofitted to reduce water consumption and the 5,000 kilometres of city water pipe infrastructure was upgraded or replaced.

The city has also spent well over $1 billion on new water treatment plants in the last five years, Fesko says, which allows it to reduce total water use and to return high-quality water to the river system.

It has also launched a conservation program aimed at the public, which is promoted by TV, radio and print advertising, and through a series of public events and social networking. The program is aimed at getting homeowners to replace aging toilets, washing machines and taps with updated, more water-efficient models. The city offers a $25 rebate to people who install a low-flow toilet as part of this program and offers apartment owners rebates as high as $2,500 to install more efficient toilets and taps in their units.

The campaign also shows consumers how to reduce their water use when watering their lawns and it has a similar program aimed at businesses. The programs are working, but Fesko points out that the city isn't the culprit when it comes to water consumption.

"The reality is we're allocated 10–11 per cent of the water from the river system and we only use about 30 per cent of that [allocation]," he says. "When it rains, we actually put more water back into the river than we use. Cities aren't net consumption users of water because it's mostly recycled. We basically borrow the water."

In the Edmonton area, city-owned utility EPCOR Utilities Inc. runs the area's water distribution and transmission system, which also has an impressive record of conservation.

Susan Ancel, director of water distribution and transmission for the utility, says consumption by average residential customers in the Edmonton area has dropped from about 22 cubic metres a month in the 1990s to 17 cubic metres now.

"The average Edmontonian uses about 209 litres of water a day, while the Canadian average is 360 litres," she said.

But although the trend across Canada has been towards less consumption, Ancel says there's still a ways to go to match the average European, who only uses about 150 litres a day.

Conserving in Edmonton

Edmonton has had water meters since 1914, so the concept of conservation has long existed in the city. The belief is that transparency, the knowledge of how much water customers are using, is a key aspect of a conserver mentality.

"A lot of cities in Canada still don't have meters," Ancel notes.

While EPCOR has programs similar to those in Calgary, which are aimed at getting customers to upgrade water-using appliances, its major campaign is targeted at getting its one million customers in the city and surrounding communities to cut back on summer demand, largely through a program that encourages reduced lawn watering. The program has been a success, allowing EPCOR to delay the need for expansion of one of its two water treatment plants for 16 years. In 2008, it spent $140 million to double the available summer capacity of the E.L. Smith Water Treatment Plant. In the past, it has upgraded the Alberta Capital Region Wastewater Treatment plant as well.

Edmonton taps the North Saskatchewan River for its water under an allotment agreement with the North Saskatchewan Watershed Alliance, a management body similar to the one overseeing the South Saskatchewan River Basin. Both are required, under long-standing agreements, to allow 50 per cent of the river volumes to flow into Saskatchewan.

"We only use four per cent of the flow of the North Saskatchewan and we return 95 per cent of that," Ancel says.

Despite this, EPCOR continues with its strategy of getting its customers to trim their consumption, leading to the launch this year of its Blue Bucket Crew campaign, which is a multimedia public awareness campaign aimed at getting out the water conservation message.

It became one of the first water utilities in North America to utilize geographic information system technology to determine how to better target conservation messages. That technology is used often by businesses, such as franchised restaurants and convenience stores, to determine where to locate stores.

That geospatial approach allowed EPCOR to determine patterns of higher-than-normal consumption. As a result, the target audience for its Blue Bucket program will be low-income renters and low-income property owners who tend not to upgrade toilets and appliances regularly, although there will be a program designed at showing them how to make upgrades themselves. Another program will target those at the opposite end of the spectrum living in higher-income neighbourhoods, who tend to over-consume. It will also be aimed at areas of the capital region where transmission upgrades are required, with the intent of delaying those.

Ancel says the goal is to see water consumption continue to drop by about one per cent a year, even though the capital region's population could as much as double in the next 30 years.

Stewards of the watersheds

Alberta's largest water users are also making strides to reduce their consumption, explains Mark Bennett, executive director of the Bow River Basin Council (BRBC), one of 11 basin councils in the province that help develop watershed policy and planning and look to protect the water supply and the quality of aquatic resources.

The BRBC, which has over 200 members from downstream and upstream of the city of Calgary—including commercial and industrial water users, those licensed to receive water, non-profit groups concerned with the issue and others—produced a recommendation in 2006 that led to the provincial government's decision to not allow new licenses for withdrawals from the South Saskatchewan Basin.

"What tipped the balance [leading to the recommendation] was new scientific evidence on stream flows that questioned whether we could sustain the aquatic habitat in the basin," he says.

According to Bennett, the Bow River, a key part of the South Saskatchewan River system, has an average annual flow of 3.4 billion cubic metres of water. Licensed allocations now are 570 million cubic metres annually.

The BRBC is also stressing the need for conservation, especially by the three irrigation districts that feed from it.

"About 76 per cent of the water allocated from the basin goes to the three irrigation districts. In the last 20 years, they have reduced their consumption by 25 per cent and their efforts to reduce consumption continue," Bennett says, adding that there are similar efforts by large water consumers province-wide.

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