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May 17, 2023

Gypsum Forest

Nutrien has recently began expanding the land reclamation project piloted here

Nutrien has recently began expanding the land reclamation project piloted here in Fort Saskatchewan that uses phosphogypsum, a gypsum byproduct of the phosphate fertilizer production process, as a base to plant and cultivate thriving forests.

Through this initiative, Nutrien's Fort Saskatchewan Nitrogen Facility has already planted 44,000 trees on 20 hectares of phosphogypsum. On June 5, in partnership with Project Forest and Trees for Life, the site began expanding on this project, kicking off plans to plant an additional 26,000 hybrid poplar trees over 17 hectares.

"We’re really pleased to announce that the company has taken a very proactive approach on a lot of our environmental initiatives, a number of projects were pushed through last year, including this one," said Ted Sawchuk, General Manager for Nutrien Fort Saskatchewan. "So we had a budget of $5 million to regrade, topsoil, and plant an additional 26,000 trees on our gypstack. We’re in the process right now of planting those trees, which will bring our site up to over 70,000 trees."

What makes this ongoing tree planting project unique is that the trees are planted in soil created from phosphogypsum. Large piles of phosphogypsum byproduct (or stacks) have been reclaimed and turned into a thriving forest by covering them with soil and seeding them to a grass planting mixture.

"In some parts of the world they use this for agriculture, construction road bases, but in North America we mostly just stack it up," explained Connie Nichol, environmental consultant with Nutrien. "Here in Fort Saskatchewan we have about 6 million tonnes of phosphogypsum that we inherited from a predecessor company. We’ve never made phosphate fertilizer here but we got these stacks of gypsum when we acquired the nitrogen facility, so we’ve just been working on reclaiming those."

Since 2005, Nutrien has partnered with the University of Alberta to develop the best strategy for reclaiming stacks of gypsum. Ongoing research and expertise from the Canadian Forest Service has led to the development of this afforestation protocol.

At the Fort Saskatchewan reclamation sites, these afforestation techniques are being used as an improved approach for reclamation, with trees growing at a rate faster than in traditional soil.

"Gypsum is a very good soil amendment because it contains calcium and sulphate, which are both plant nutrients," said Nichol. "What we’ve found over the series of twenty odd years of working with the University of Alberta, is that by mixing soil into this byproduct gypsum you create something better. Trees that are growing of the gypsum soil are bigger, healthier, and they have greater biomass. When we did experiments the mixture grew better trees and plants than soil alone or gypsum alone."

Nutrien reported that the trees they planted in 2015 and 2016 have already reached heights of more than nine meters tall.

The tree plantations are not only aesthetically pleasing, they also bring environmental benefits to the area, including new wildlife habitat, a stronger local ecosystem, and carbon sequestration capturing an estimate of 1000 tonnes a year of carbon dioxide.

Nutrien says that the tree planting will be completed by the end of the week, and that within two years the trees will have grown tall enough for an enclosed canopy, growing at a rate of 1.5-2 meters per year.

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