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The Sahtu Secretariat says it will support the issuing of a temporary water licence to keep Imperial Oil’s Norman Wells facility operating through an environmental assessment.
The secretariat, which represents the Sahtu Dene and Métis, referred the facility to assessment in the fall.
Environmental assessments are the most rigorous form of regulatory scrutiny the NWT has. They can take many months, if not years.
Imperial has said the launching of the assessment interrupted efforts to renew its water licence – a requirement to operate the Norman Wells oil field. The existing water licence is due to expire in March.
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The company has asked regulator the Sahtu Land and Water Board for an emergency extension of its existing licence or the issuing of a temporary new licence, to ensure the facility remains operational beyond March while the assessment is carried out.
In a letter late last year, Imperial said dozens of jobs and millions of dollars in tax revenue for the Town of Norman Wells were at stake.
Just before Christmas, the Sahtu Secretariat said it supported an emergency licence that would cover a three-year period, a solution the land and water board had suggested it was considering.
“While environmental assessment remains necessary,” the secretariat’s lawyers wrote to the land and water board, the secretariat recognizes “the potential impacts” if the facility has to be hastily shut down in winter – which Imperial said would be the probable outcome without an emergency water licence in place.
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Meanwhile, a third environmental assessment related to Imperial’s Norman Wells facility appears to be on the horizon.
Alongside the assessment of the facility as a whole, a second assessment is already examining proposed repair work to pipelines beneath the Mackenzie River.
Now, Imperial says it will itself trigger a third environmental assessment before April related to the final closure of the Norman Wells site.
It is possible that one or more of the three assessments could be combined, though so far there has been no indication of that.
The Norman Wells oil field, which is more than a century old and central to the town’s economy, is said by Imperial to have at most another five to 10 years’ life before closure.
