• About
    • Which Energy Mix is this?
  • Climate News Network Archive
  • Contact
The climate news that makes a difference.
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
  FEATURED
Biden Approves $8B Oil Extraction Plan in Ecologically Sensitive Alaska March 14, 2023
U.S. Solar Developers Scramble after Silicon Valley Bank Collapse March 14, 2023
$30.9B Price Tag Makes Trans Mountain Pipeline a ‘Catastrophic Boondoggle’ March 14, 2023
UN Buys Tanker, But Funding Gap Could Scuttle Plan to Salvage Oil from ‘Floating Time Bomb’ March 9, 2023
Biden Cuts Fossil Subsidies, But Oil and Gas Still Lines Up for Billions March 9, 2023
Next
Prev

With 155,000 Abandoned Oil and Gas Wells, Albertans Bear the Clean-Up Costs

November 5, 2018
Reading time: 3 minutes

Thank you for visiting my page/Flickr

Thank you for visiting my page/Flickr

21
SHARES
 

Hot on the heels of National Observer’s report last week that clean-up costs in Alberta’s oilpatch could hit C$260 billion, a new investigation by The Narwhal shows how individual Albertans are already facing down the cost of abandoned fossil infrastructure.

“Landowners once promised a fair share for hosting oil and gas infrastructure on their properties say Alberta’s liability management system is broken,” The Narwhal reports. “They’re worried the regulator has long been propping up the industry by exaggerating profits and underestimating the costs of cleanup—often leaving landowners with a tangled mess of wells, rusty pipes, and contaminated soil.”

  • Be among the first to read The Energy Mix Weekender
  • A brand new weekly digest containing exclusive and essential climate stories from around the world.
  • The Weekender:The climate news you need.
Subscribe

The news report begins with a profile of an abandoned well near Taber, Alberta, now classified as an orphan site, one of 2,000 left behind by bankrupt fossils and now under the care of the province’s Orphan Well Association that have not yet been sealed. With a farm right nearby, “if there’s a leak and it gets into the potato crop, it’s going right there into the French fry factory,” said Daryl Bennett, director of Action Surface Rights, a group “dedicated to helping fellow landowners understand and navigate the maze of government and industry processes.”

“The problems facing farmers are numerous,” The Narwhal writes, citing Bennett. They must “ensure their irrigation systems can pass over wells without hitting them, farm around the roads that lead to wellsites, deal with the dust and weeds that come with disturbed soil, and worry about contamination of their crops—and they often face long, paperwork-filled fights to claim the annual rent they’re owed by energy companies.”

The article points to a growing movement of Alberta landowners worrying that the Alberta Energy Regulator is “propping up a beleaguered industry without requiring the necessary assurances that wells will be cleaned up in the future. Critics worry not only that orphan wells are already sitting neglected in farmers’ fields across the province, but that a whole new wave of inactive wells is poised to be thrust onto the Orphan Well Association—and that, increasingly, taxpayers may be forced to shoulder the bill.”

“They’re putting the best spin on it,” said farmer and Action Surface Rights chair Ronald Huvenaars. “If you went to an accountant and had it audited, there’s no way an accountant would ever sign off on that.”

“This type of system works well during an oil boom but not so well during an oil bust,” agreed one University of Calgary briefing paper.

At current rates of expenditure, The Narwhal notes, it would take 177 years to remediate the province’s entire inventory of inactive, suspended, abandoned, and orphan wells.

Huvenaars told The Narwhal the situation leaves farmers feeling powerless to deal with the fossil industry’s footprint on their land. Pembina Institute policy analyst Jodi McNeill added that an inactive well where problems develop poses a risk of explosion, soil and water contamination, release of air pollutants—and greenhouse gas emissions.

“When something hasn’t been plugged, it just continually releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,” she told The Narwhal.

“The [regulator’s] system is not achieving anything,” added lawyer Keith Wilson. “If anything, it’s creating a false sense of comfort that this problem is being addressed—and we know it’s not.”

Bennett and others are concerned about the upcoming Supreme Court decision in the Redwater case, in which a lower court ruled that creditors’ right to collect on a bankrupt company’s financial obligation takes precedence over their environmental obligations.

“If this decision is upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada, we—and every other regulator in Canada—will no longer be able to hold companies accountable for cleaning up their mess,” the AER said in its intervention with the court last February.

Alberta has about 455,000 oil wells, according to a C.D. Howe Institute report, of which 155,000 are no longer in production. Against that daunting backlog, “the Orphan Well Association brought in just $30 million from the orphan fund levy, collected from industry, in 2017,” The Narwhal notes. Since 2009, the association has received more than $30 million in grants and a loan worth $235 million from the province, with Ottawa kicking in another $30 million. Last year, the association spent $30 million to cap just 232 wells.



in Biodiversity & Habitat, Canada, Health & Safety, Oil & Gas, Sub-National Governments, Tar Sands / Oil Sands

The latest climate news and analysis, direct to your inbox

Subscribe

Related Posts

Environmental Defence Canada/flickr
Shale & Fracking

Repsol Abandons Plan to Ship Canadian LNG to Europe

March 17, 2023
177
U.S. Bureau of Land Management/flickr
Oil & Gas

Biden Approves $8B Oil Extraction Plan in Ecologically Sensitive Alaska

March 14, 2023
114
David Dodge, Green Energy Futures/flickr
Community Climate Finance

U.S. Solar Developers Scramble after Silicon Valley Bank Collapse

March 14, 2023
330

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

Trending Stories

David Dodge, Green Energy Futures/flickr

U.S. Solar Developers Scramble after Silicon Valley Bank Collapse

March 14, 2023
330
Environmental Defence Canada/flickr

Repsol Abandons Plan to Ship Canadian LNG to Europe

March 17, 2023
177
Rebecca Bollwitt/flickr

Fossils Stay ‘Oily’, Gibsons Sues Big Oil, U.S. Clean Energy Booms, EU Pushes Fossil Phaseout, and Fukushima Disaster was ‘No Accident’

March 14, 2023
177
U.S. National Transportation Safety Board/flickr

$30.9B Price Tag Makes Trans Mountain Pipeline a ‘Catastrophic Boondoggle’

March 14, 2023
236
Behrat/Wikimedia Commons

Hawaii Firm Turns Home Water Heaters into Grid Batteries

March 14, 2023
439
Joshua Doubek/Wikipedia

No New Jobs Came from Alberta’s $4B ‘Job Creation’ Tax Cut for Big Oil

October 6, 2022
805

Recent Posts

U.S. Bureau of Land Management/flickr

Biden Approves $8B Oil Extraction Plan in Ecologically Sensitive Alaska

March 14, 2023
114
EcoAnalytics

Canadians Want Strong Emissions Cap Regulations, Not More Missed Targets

March 14, 2023
123
Raysonho/wikimedia commons

Purolator Pledges $1B to Electrify Last-Mile Delivery

March 14, 2023
79
United Nations

UN Buys Tanker, But Funding Gap Could Scuttle Plan to Salvage Oil from ‘Floating Time Bomb’

March 10, 2023
94
Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons

Biden Cuts Fossil Subsidies, But Oil and Gas Still Lines Up for Billions

March 10, 2023
185
jasonwoodhead23/flickr

First Nation Scorches Imperial Oil, Alberta Regulator Over Toxic Leak

March 8, 2023
374
Next Post
jasonwoodhead23/flickr

New Green Bonds Could Trigger $1 Trillion in Tar Sands/Oil Sands Activity

The Energy Mix - The climate news you need

Copyright 2023 © Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy and Copyright
  • Cookie Policy

Proudly partnering with…

scf_withtagline
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities

Copyright 2022 © Smarter Shift Inc. and Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}