The firm

Capability Statement

A Canadian-owned geoscience consultancy holding Permits to Practice in Alberta and in British Columbia. The practice covers watershed geoscience, groundwater hydrology, terrain analysis, and the infrastructure that sits within them, with the firm's own sensors and software integrated into the methodologies it applies.

The firm

Legal name: Fluvial Engineering Inc.
Incorporation: Alberta, with extra-provincial registration in British Columbia
Alberta: Permit to Practice geoscience — Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA)
British Columbia: Permit to Practice — Engineers and Geoscientists BC
Responsible member: William Shulba, P.Geo. — Responsible Member (APEGA) and Member Responsible (EGBC)
Offices: Corporate office in Sherwood Park, Alberta. Satellite office in British Columbia.
Area of operation: The Peace region and west-central Alberta, northeast British Columbia, and the settled and agricultural areas of both provinces.
Engagement: Directly by owners and operators, and as a subconsultant to environmental and engineering prime consultants.

Services

Watercourse crossing assessments: Hydrotechnical characterization and design inputs for road, pipeline, and utility crossings — channel geometry, design flows, scour.
Dewatering plans: Groundwater and surface-water management for works below the water table — inflow estimates, drawdown behaviour, and discharge routing.
Hydrogeology and water wells: Drilling supervision, pumping-test design and analysis, aquifer parameters and sustainable yield, and monitoring network design.
Water balance assessments: Inflow–outflow accounting for borrow pits, aggregate operations, and disturbed catchments, reconciled month by month.
Watershed and peak-flow studies: Catchment delineation and characterization, with design events derived from the climate and streamflow record for the basin.
Terrain and geohazard analysis: Slope, aspect, and flow-accumulation derivatives read with the geological setting to identify the controls governing a site.
Aggregate assessment and exploration: Sand and gravel deposits identified and evaluated — surficial geology and terrain mapping, a test programme, delineation, and volume.
Agricultural and irrigation water supply: Source development for farms, irrigation districts, and rural operations, through to the works and the licence permitting use.
Monitoring and instrumentation: Instruments specified, deployed, and read into a documented data framework built for the question at hand.

Analytical capability

Analytical work is carried out on FluviOS, the firm's analytical engine. Each module pairs a documented methodology with the software that implements it, under version control. A run records its input datasets, parameters, module versions, and outputs, and that record is retained with the deliverable, so a result can be reproduced from the version that produced it.

Terrain and hydrology: Watershed delineation, flow networks, and terrain derivatives from LiDAR (SAGA) · spatial climate analysis for rainfall, evapotranspiration, and snowmelt · hydrological modelling on HEC-HMS · channel and hydraulic modelling on HEC-RAS
Water balance: Modified Monthly Water Balance — the firm's own methodology, applied to any polygon: borrow pit, lake, wetland, excavation, construction pit
Groundwater: Pumping-test analysis on AQTESOLV for transmissivity, storativity, and boundary effects · time-series analysis on the open-source Pastas library, separating pumping response from climatic signal
In development: fluvios3D extends the engine to the subsurface and its geological framework; fluvios4D adds continuous monitoring and sensor time series.

Field and subsurface methods

Drilling and testing: Water well drilling supervised on site, with the log and the samples recorded as the hole advances · pumping tests designed, run, and analysed · test pit and borehole programmes logged for calibration
Geophysics: Ground-penetrating radar for granular contacts, depth to till or bedrock, and peat thickness · electromagnetic terrain conductivity where clay or depth attenuates radar · electrical resistivity for confining layers and the water table · seismic refraction where rippability governs a pit design
Instrumentation: Custom sensors specified and installed, producing time-series datasets in a documented format
Data: Open federal and provincial climate, hydrometric, groundwater, and terrain datasets, read against the standards the assessment is measured by

Representative experience

Borrow pit water balance program: Borrow excavations at well pads, compressor sites, and access roads assessed on an annual and monthly cycle since 2023. More than thirty sites in the Peace region and west-central Alberta, supporting authorizations to excavate under the Water Act.
Aggregate geology and pit volume analysis: Granular deposits at borrow and gravel sources in northern Alberta — surficial geology and terrain mapping bounded by geophysical section, calibrated by test pits, carried to recoverable volume and the water conditions a working pit will meet.
Watercourse crossing hydrology and scour: Crossings on a linear corridor in Alberta, assessed in successive tranches for contributing catchment, design flows, and scour against the Code of Practice for Watercourse Crossings.
Pad, road, and pipeline drainage in wetland terrain: A well pad, its access road, and the connecting pipeline in northeast British Columbia under BC Energy Regulator permits, as a subcontract to the prime engineering consultant.
Wetland assessment for well sites and a highway grading project: Wetland extents and hydrological function in northern Alberta to the Alberta Wetland Mapping Standards, peat thickness and basal contact profiled by ground-penetrating radar, lateral extent mapped by terrain conductivity.
Overland flow and site drainage characterization: Catchment boundaries and overland flow paths delineated across a development site in Alberta, issued as spatial data in the coordinate system and formats the design team works in.

Practice management and safety

Professional Practice Management Plan: Maintained as both regulators require of a permit holder, covering areas of practice, quality management, authentication, records and chain of custody, continuing professional development, conflict of interest, subconsultants, field operations, insurance, and annual review.
Authentication: The responsible member authenticates only deliverables he has personally reviewed and accepted as meeting professional standards, whatever the workflow by which they were prepared. FluviOS applies the plan's quality management and chain-of-custody provisions to analytical work.
Health and safety: The firm maintains its own program — policy, hazard assessment, written field procedures, retained records. It is internal; the firm does not hold third-party safety certification. Site work is carried out under the operator's requirements alongside the firm's own procedures.
Statutory: The Occupational Health and Safety Act in Alberta; the Workers Compensation Act and its regulation in British Columbia.

Contact

Enquiries: admin@fluvial.ca · fluvial.ca
Offices: Sherwood Park, Alberta · British Columbia

Projects are described without client names, site identifiers, or legal land descriptions; references are available on request. Work is carried out under the firm's Permits to Practice. Nothing in this statement constitutes a professional opinion; opinions are issued only in sealed deliverables.