Fresh water is the world's most precious and essential natural resource. This is especially true for potable water sources on the Canadian Prairies, where the search for a satisfactory groundwater supply often presents a significant challenge.  Even as late as the 1950s, few small urban communities in the Canadian Prairies had the luxury of an installed water and sewer system.  At the same time, cities were outgrowing their existing water supplies.  Moreover, emerging resource industries - potash, sodium sulphate and oil and gas among them - needed large quantities of water to develop their resource and accompanying infrastructure.

Our engineers and geoscientists have located and developed roughly 200 groundwater sources for small and large municipalities, and for new resource industries spread across the four western provinces in Canada. We started looking for clues to groundwater drilling sites, assuming that an acceptable source of groundwater quantity and quality could be found somewhere within an economic radius of where it was needed.  We soon discovered that finding suitable municipal and industrial groundwater sources was immensely more difficult than finding well supplies for individual farmers. To help identify exploratory drilling sites, we interpreted 3-D airphotos, surficial and bedrock geology maps, agricultural soil survey maps, topographic and surface drainage maps, and water well logs located within an economic search area. We drew information from seismic shothole logs and existing water-well reports. We also talked to individual farmers with water wells in order to construct an inventory of their location, depth, static and pumping water levels and water quality. In addition, we met with town councils and encountered the occasional water diviner:  some witching with forked sticks, others balancing a crowbar, and still others walking around and sensing underground water in their bare feet (unless there was snow on the ground).

We integrated our collected groundwater information with surface indicators of groundwater interpreted from 3D airphoto, GIS-integrated map information and geophysical data.  We looked for water-bearing sand and gravel sites in kames and eskers, outwash plains and deltas, abandoned glacial spillways and other meltwater channels, chains of aligned tunnel valley depressions holding fresh and saline water, alluvial terraces and floodplains in addition to active and inactive springs and seeps and soapholes, and anomalous patches of salty ground overlying artesian aquifers.  We also studied airphotos for subtle indicators of intertill aquifers, such as springs, seeps and alkali-salt patches.

Roughly 80% of our approximate 200 groundwater studies were undertaken for cities, towns, villages and hamlets.  Aquifer transmissivities varied from roughly 100 to 20,000 m²/d with a common range of 250 to 500 m²/d. Safe well yields commonly varied from approimately 150 to 5,000 m³/d, with most wells yielding 250 to 350 m³/d. Total dissolved solids values ranged from approximately 500 to 2,700 mg/P with common values between 1,000 and 1,500 mg/P.

However, locating, developing and evaluating groundwater sources was not our only groundwater consulting project.  A major groundwater study involved identifying high watertable and salinity areas adjoining the old roughly 150-km-long St. Mary irrigation canal in southern Alberta, which was in the process of being rehabilitated. Leakage from the old canal had created adjoining patches of high salinity, significantly limiting grain and vegetable production. 

Other groundwater projects involved identifying karst development in evaporite strata, where sinkholes and solution-enlarged passageways formed, affecting mine dewatering for a lead-zinc operation at Gays River in Nova Scotia.  Evaporite-solution collapse holes were also identified along sections of a CN rail line in northern Nova Scotia. Karst features also influenced the locations of highway and pipeline routes in the Northwest Territories. 

In southeastern British Columbia, engineers and geoscientists at J.D. Mollard and Associates (2010) Limited discovered a potable groundwater supply at a flowing artesian aquifer orifice, located at the edge of a floodplain in a mountain valley wherein the Elk River was affected by acid mine drainage. The negative effects of groundwater on the performance of dams and on the stability of slopes have also been studied. Our staff also located groundwater to wash caverns used to store natural gas in deep evaporite formations near Regina, Landis and Prudhomme in Saskatchewan, and located a groundwater supply for a large oilfield waterflood operation at Boundary Lake in northeastern British Columbia. During exploring for groundwater there, some hundred metres below ground surface, the well driller and our hydrogeologist were surprised to see large quantities of wheat straw and feathers coming up with the drilling mud.  Upon careful study, we learned that oil-well drillers had inserted ground-up straw and feathers into the well bore to prevent water loss into openwork gravel.

A major groundwater investigation was completed in 2002 as part of a multi-million dollar international research project, investigating the geological integrity of the Weyburn CO₂ project where CO₂ is being injected into the Weyburn oil field to enhance oil production and then sequester the CO₂ gas in the oil reservoir.