Want your flood to start quickly? It may take over 7 months for the ERCB to approve your application. You may be waiting until June 2011 to get GPP and start your injection wells.

Even though most ER applications are taking a fairly long time to be approved by the ERCB, Proven’s applications continue to be approved in about 3 months. Over the last four months, average industry approval time has hovered around 7 months.

Water flood approvals often bring the unrestricted production rates that come with GPP approval. Waiting a half year for water flood approval usually means waiting a half year for removal of MRL restricted production.

Approval rates have been poor some months. In March, almost 50% of the decisions made by the ERCB were to close or refuse applications. Reasons for closure range from incorrect notification to inadequate justification for voidage replacement.

After spacing applications, the next highest volume of resource applications received by the ERCB is usually ER Schemes.

This type of ERCB application includes many different schemes. ER Schemes can be water floods, CO2 or miscible floods, amendments, or polymer or ASP floods. Every time an injector is added, or more land is added to a flood, or a flood is terminated, the ERCB requires an application. They also require a new application every time VRR needs to be adjusted, or injection fluid is changed.

Proven Reserves submit more Enhanced Recovery Schemes than any other company in Alberta.

~Granger J. Low

An Ontario MP is proposing a private member’s bill to Parliament to ban plastic shopping bags across Canada.

The idea for the bill comes from a proposal written by two high school students for a competition on how they would improve Canada. The committee that selected the proposal said they chose it for the amount of research that was put into it.

Toronto has already imposed a 5¢ charge on plastic shopping bags, leading many retailers to discontinue their use, while the small community of Leaf Rapids, Manitoba banned the bags completely three years ago.

Irene Mathyssen, New Democrat MP for London-Fanshawe who is proposing the bill, recalls that plastic bags weren’t always used at retail, and blames Canadians’ “addiction to plastic.” She also claims that plastic bags are already falling out of use in parts of Europe.

Allen Langdon of the Canadian Council of Grocery Distributors suggests that alternate solutions – such as retailer incentives or rebates – would be a better approach to decreasing plastic bag usage than an outright ban.

Though plastic bag manufacturing may be a comparatively small use of petroleum, a ban will affect the way business is done in Canada.