Montney permits climb as two operators add rigs near Wembley
Nineteen new licences west of the city this quarter, the most since 2022 — and this round comes with water plans attached.
The regulator's quarterly licence list landed this week with a number the service sector has been waiting on: nineteen new well licences in the Montney fairway west of the city, the strongest quarter since 2022, with two operators each moving an additional rig into the Wembley area before freeze-up.
The pace shows up in town before it shows up in production data. The hotels along the bypass are back to weekday no-vacancy, the machine shops are hiring winter crews in September, and the county's road-use agreements — the paperwork that decides who fixes a haul route in March — are being signed at a clip the public works office calls "2018 with better manners."
The better manners are in the licences themselves. Most of this round's applications came in with water-sourcing plans that lean on stored dugout and effluent supply rather than fresh river draws — partly regulation, partly memory. The dry years are recent enough that nobody wants to be the operator explaining a river intake in a drought summer.
The county's reeve, asked what nineteen licences mean for the budget, did the arithmetic out loud: linear assessment follows the wells by about two years. "The rigs are welcome," she said. "The taxes are welcomer, and they run on a delay. We plan on the delay."
