Out in the scenic central Alberta countryside, an encounter with envoys from Calgary has left Penny Archibald feeling born again. “It was amazing how it worked,” she says. “I’ve never seen anything work so well.”

The visitors were not missionaries. She is not describing a religion or church. She is a convert to a community relations breakthrough invented in downtown office towers of the Canadian oil capital.
The approach, devised by the province’s Energy Resources Conservation Board, shows signs of spreading. But it will never make headlines or inspire television programs and movies. It spoils conflict stories and conspiracy theories about industrial exploitation disrupting landscapes and lives. Archibald is talking about a formula for making peace between the petroleum industry and communities.

There is no doubt which side of the fence Archibald comes from. She lives on a farm. She is a Red Deer county councilor. The oil industry is a newcomer by comparison. Her family has roots in rural Alberta dating back to 1886 and the earliest beginnings of homesteading a generation before the province was carved out of the 19th-century Northwest Territories.

Archibald’s eye-opening encounter was with senior ERCB agents who guided company leaders in their experimental effort to fit industry into her community. The trial run was one of four extended experiments in social and economic engineering by a program called the “Land Challenge Initiative” that touched down in a variety of Alberta regions.

The effort grew out of an awakening in Calgary. The ERCB and industry alike realized that people like Archibald are not going to go away. They also realize that these people know how to fight back if they feel mistreated. The land challenge technique goes beyond standard disclosure, consultation and enforcement practice by building trust and relationships.

Archibald’s district, midway between Edmonton and Calgary, sits squarely in the path of an aggressive form of fossil fuel production embedded with potential for confrontation. The activity took the province by storm when the energy economics cycle peaked in the first few years of the 21st century and will grow as demand and prices make comebacks after the current lull. Enter unconventional natural gas, initially as intensive drilling into methane-infused coal seams carpeting much of central Alberta.

About 10,000 coalbed methane wells, drilled in less than five years, were only the first generation of unconventional gas. Next comes even more vigorous work on shale, with industry blasting flow channels into dense rock layers that resemble giant hockey pucks with potent “fraccing” injections of fluid that fracture the geology.

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