Oil and gas wells are not just at CFB Wainwright. They are just about everywhere

The flames were still a kilometre away when powerful winds shifted. Suddenly, a wall of fire ripped across the dry prairie grass toward Canadian soldiers training at CFB Wainwright.

Within seconds, the blaze overtook their position, turning what was a routine military exercise into a desperate fight for survival.

Four soldiers were killed, and 39 others were injured as first responders rushed to put out the fire while saving everyone they could.

The cause of Oct. 17th’s fire remains under investigation, but the tragedy has drawn attention to a little-known feature of the sprawling military training grounds: roughly 200 oil and gas wells.

Officials say a natural gas well or pipeline didn’t play a role in the deadly fire at Wainwright. But the incident raises questions about the precautions needed around energy infrastructure — not just at that base, but in other places across the country.

In Alberta alone, wells are in many other unexpected places — parks, university campuses and residential neighbourhoods. Calgary and Edmonton even have a few wells within city limits, if you look hard enough.

“That was a surprise to me,” said Rene Fournier, who built a website that tracks wells across Canada.

“I thought there’s something wrong with my data,” Fournier said. “It turns out — nope.”

In Calgary, there are several wells, according to Canada Well Finder, the site Fournier built using publicly available data from energy regulators across several provinces.

In the Edmonton area, there are hundreds of wells.

Both the University of Alberta and the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology have wells, along with their two sister schools in Calgary. Of the four campuses, only the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology has an active well, used for educational purposes.

Wells have also had lasting implications for some residential areas. Over a decade ago, residents of Calmar, a town south of Edmonton, had to leave their homes while methane leaking from old wells was patched.

Methane is the primary hydrocarbon in natural gas, and often leaks from oil wells — both active and abandoned ones — in small amounts.

“Methane or natural gas emissions are part of (oil) production to some degree,” said Dave Risk, a professor at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia who studies methane.

Risk said those emissions used to be “dumped” into the atmosphere or flared, but are better managed now across the country under federal regulations.

For abandoned wells, the Alberta Energy Regulator requires that they be “sealed” by pumping them full of concrete. It’s an expensive process that often leads to wells being left in a sort of “zombie” state for years, he said.

“They can exist in Alberta for multiple decades because the abandonment process is expensive,” Risk said.

There’s even an active well in Calgary’s Fish Creek Provincial Park, and around a dozen wells with varying statuses near Big Island Provincial Park in Edmonton, according to Well Finder.

The Alberta Energy Regulator keeps records of well sites and monitors over 450,000 kilometers of pipelines in the province, more than half of which carried natural gas last year.

On top of that, it’s responsible for setting safety standards and enforcing them across the wells and pipelines it monitors — a process that encompasses operations, maintenance and the eventual decommissioning of infrastructure.

Risk said that active wells are well documented and monitored.

“Active infrastructure has good regulations with excellent locational databases and information,” he said.

In total, Fournier has mapped more than 850,000 oil and gas wells, with opening dates from 1858 to 2026. According to provincial figures, Alberta has about half of those, or 466,000.

However, the country’s first well wasn’t even in Alberta.

“In 1858, the first commercial oil well in North America was drilled in Oil Springs, Ontario,” Fournier said.

Old wells often are not producing, especially those as ancient as the Ontario borehole. The same applies for many wells in cities, the data shows.

At Wainwright, the fire was near some active wells and pipeline infrastructure owned by multiple operators, which may mean the devastating incident could have been even worse.

The Alberta Energy Regulator said companies are required to notify the agency “immediately” if an incident affects their facilities. It has not received any incident reports involving oil and gas infrastructure from operators around the base.

Last Thursday, the Canadian Armed Forces told reporters the fire was caused by regular training exercises on Wainwright’s automatic grenade range that day. They did not say what exactly ignited the fire.

Brig.-Gen. Vanessa Hanrahan, deputy Canadian Forces provost marshal, said there is no indication natural gas was a factor, or that the fire damaged any infrastructure.

Whether a well is abandoned or active is “irrelevant” to the risk, Karlis Muehlenbachs, a professor at the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Science, said.

“Obviously there’s gonna be investigations, but the information will be there,” Muehlenbachs said.

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