Water Quality

Protecting the quality of our water sources is part of our commitment to managing water use in an efficient way. Canadian Natural, as a partner with other oil sands operators, manages water withdrawals to ensure that the ecology of the Athabasca River is maintained in all flow conditions. In addition to this, we have no discharges to the river of produced water from our Horizon plant.

In our International operations, all our installations are currently operating within internal targets and regulatory discharge limits for oil to the sea.

Canadian Natural has established stringent operating standards to minimize produced water volumes and optimize water discharge quality in offshore operations.

Produced water quality in the North Sea during 2010 remained below our internal target and well within the regulatory compliance limit. In West Africa, each installation operates below the produced water limit as defined in the Environmental Impact Assessment for each field.

A produced water re-injection facility running on our Ninian Central Platform in the North Sea allows us to recycle water into the reservoir. In 2010, we recycled almost 700,000 cubic metres of water and avoided the discharge of 11 tonnes of oil to sea.