It’s one of those ideal matches that were destined to happen.

The technology to clean up oil-contaminated roads and the machine that digs up the problem.

It’s also an Alberta story, an account of two independent companies – Enviro One Oilfield Logistics of Calgary, and Edmonton-based Road Badger – working together. Enviro One purchased the first Road Badger off the production line in Canada.

Enviro One operates in the three most western Canadian provinces, reclaiming polluted land and decontaminating roads.

Dennis Relf, left, and Darren Janzen of Enviro One Oilfield Logistics have earned much praise.

Road Badger is a company built around its patented machine that restores dirt, gravel and cold-mix road surfaces efficiently and quickly, yielding significant savings for companies and all levels of government having to maintain road infrastructure, runways and travelling surfaces.

“The Road Badger is a perfect fit with our company because of the way it reconditions roads,” explains Dennis Relf, operating partner with Enviro One.

One of his company’s procedures now in great demand is the reclamation of petroleum products from soil that’s been contaminated, for example, around pump jacks on land leased from farmers.

But among the most widespread evidence of oil is along rural roads. The gooey liquid was commonly sprayed to keep down the dust, but eventually it finds its way into the watershed.

The Road Badger restores roads to pristine condition.

Enviro One bought itself a Road Badger. Not only does it refurbish roads, it aids in getting at that oil.

And just how does Relf’s company remove the oil?

With bacteria.

“It’s a 100-per-cent natural process,” Relf explains. “We inject billions of naturally occurring bacteria, and they eat the contaminants.

“Nature would do that anyway, but it would take 100 to 200 years for it to occur naturally. We can remove the oil this way in three to four months.”

Meanwhile, the Road Badger has reconstructed the road base to put it back in pristine physical shape. The machine achieves that with a patented scarifying and discing action. They go as deep as six inches into the road surface and retrieve old gravel that’s been pounded into the road bed. This eliminates the need to keep adding new gravel on top of the old.

Ray Gillard, general manager of Road Badger, says the procedure saves end users a significant amount of time and money, and results in a quality rehabilitation of the road.

“It then remixes the product into a spec gravel situation and leaves it on top of the road,” Gillard explains. “What you’ve now got is a perfect travelling surface and you don’t have the cost of having to re-gravel.”

In general, transportation specialists advise re-gravelling every three years. But when new gravel is spread around a badly rutted road, the little stones merely fill in the holes like water in a puddle.

“The next car along will just spew it all out again,” Gillard says. “This machine corrects the problems in the road. You’re going to save a whole lot of money.”

Road Badger has been praised by various government agencies and large resource companies having to maintain their own road systems, including the massive Alberta Pacific a few weeks ago. In a testimonial letter, the company’s management said the machine yields “significant savings” on gravel roads. EnCana has been working with numerous First Nations groups, promoting the Road Badger in creating jobs and improved road infrastructure on aboriginal lands.

EnCana also wrote a positive letter about the Road Badger, citing significant improvements and major cost savings in its roads because of the machine.

When used by Enviro One, the Road Badger also assists in decontaminating the road. It’s just one of the cleanup jobs done by Enviro One, a company with First Nations majority owners and an office in Nisku.

Enviro One president Darren Janzen, a Metis, says the people behind the company are committed to protecting the environment on a broad scale.

For example, by hiring Enviro One to treat contaminants at a specific site rather than trucking tonnes of soil to a central area, it saves not only money but also the fuel that would have been burned by trucks doing the hauling.

“We can cut greenhouse gases considerably,” Janzen says.

The company remediates a wide variety of sites altered over the years by oil and gas, mining and logging operations. Sometimes, heavy equipment has packed down farmland so hard it can no longer grow anything.

The solution is to dig deep and churn the soil to permit revegetation.

Enviro One continues to make advances in its technology and is taking a leadership position in environmental regeneration.

“Environmental awareness is really growing,” Janzen says.

“Our company is in a great position to excel.”

For further information, call Enviro One at 1.866.443.0709 or fax 403.243.6431 in Calgary. Road Badger can be reached by calling 780.433.4322; fax 780.665.7269; e-mail sales@roadbadger.com or visit www.roadbadger.com