Community

Working with landowners

Every landowner Bedrock works with does so by agreement. We will not seek to compel anyone, and a neighbour who does not want to take part does not have to. That is a commitment, not a negotiating position.

Land that is not built on stays in production. Land taken out of production is returned to agriculture when the project is decommissioned, and Bedrock is willing to have that obligation written into a municipal agreement and secured by a bond rather than left as an undertaking that depends on the company still being here in forty years.

Safe and secure

The reservoirs sit more than 500 metres below the surface, well below the aquifers that supply local wells and separated from them by the same natural rock seals that held natural gas in place for millions of years. The wells reaching them carry multiple cemented casing strings.

That is our position, and we do not think we should be the only party asserting it. Bedrock has offered an independent review of the reservoirs by a reviewer the municipality helps choose, published in full whatever it finds, together with baseline testing offered free to neighbouring wells.

Security of supply matters to the people who live here too. A site that can hold power in reserve is a site the wider system can lean on when the weather turns.

Low environmental impact

The lowest-impact infrastructure is the kind that reuses what is already there. The reservoirs exist and have held pressure for millions of years, so nothing has to be excavated. The transmission already crosses the site, so no new corridor has to be acquired across anybody’s farm. The wells reaching the formations are properly characterised and maintained for decades, which in a part of Ontario carrying a long legacy of abandoned oil and gas wells counts for something.

Compressed air storage burns nothing. The gas turbines on site do, and they are designed from the outset for hydrogen blending and carbon capture, running when the system needs them rather than continuously. Environmental assessment work with Stantec is under way and its findings will be published.

Investing here

Bedrock is working towards a Community Benefits Agreement, and planning it in step with the people it is meant to benefit. What that agreement is worth and who governs it are matters to settle with the municipality and with neighbours, not to announce ahead of them.

Alongside it: property taxes at the industrial rate, construction employment over several years, permanent operating roles, and a Road Users Agreement covering the roads the build will actually use and committing Bedrock to maintaining and repairing them.

How we work

Questions asked publicly get answered publicly, including the uncomfortable ones, and where the answer is “we do not know yet” we say so. The record of our open houses, the presentation boards and the answers to the questions neighbours have actually asked are all below.

If you are a landowner, a neighbour or a member of council and you want to talk to someone, write to us. We would rather hear it early.