Public inquiry needed into Alberta Energy Regulator, U of C study concludes

Academics at the University of Calgary are calling for a public review of the Alberta Energy Regulator, describing it as secretive and too close to industry.A decommissioned pumpjack is shown at a well head on an oil and gas installation near Cremona, Alta. in 2016. The liability of orphaned wells in the province is estimated to be at least $60 billion.

"There needs to be an inquiry of some kind," said co-author and resource law professor Martin Olszynski. "Albertans don't have the information they need."Alberta may have to return $130M in unspent federal funding for oil and gas well cleanupAlberta has about 230,000 drilled wells that need to be abandoned and reclaimed. Another 90,000 have been abandoned but not reclaimed.

Legislation requires companies to clean up after themselves, but that obligation comes only after an order from the regulator. Although the province now has reclamation spending targets for industry, those targets are also set at the regulator's discretion. An aerial view as the pipe of a decommissioned well is pulled up out of the ground and stacked nearby.

"Mandatory closure spend quotas specify the minimum amount of money that licensees are required to spend on closure work each year," she said. The regulator used to post how much security each company had posted, as well as its score on the system used to assess ability to clean up old sites. The information on security was no longer posted after 2010 and individual liability scores were kept private after 2019, says the report.

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