"A Giant Stinking Pile Of Shit" - Provincial Gov Pitches Abandoned Well Cleanup Plan - Rural Albertans Not Having It
If Vitor Marciano, the chief of staff to Alberta’s energy minister, thought he was going to get a warm reception at a recent meeting in the village of Warburg, he was mistaken. Marciano faced jeers and doubt as he tried to sell a largely rural crowd on the government’s latest plan to deal with a cascade of problems caused by the oil and gas sector.
Around 100 people were in the Warburg Community Hall on Sept. 9 to hear Marciano talk about the Mature Asset Strategy. It’s a series of recommendations the government says will help with the oil and gas industry’s unpaid taxes and leases, which include tens of thousands of inactive wells and environmental liabilities of almost $38 billion, according to the Alberta Energy Regulator. He was joined, unexpectedly, by the author of that strategy, Dave Yager, a board member of the regulator and a special advisor to Premier Danielle Smith. Yager was not advertised as a guest.
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Municipalities are owed $254 million in outstanding property taxes from oil and gas companies, while another $200 million has been written off in the past decade, never to be collected. According to the Rural Municipalities of Alberta, more than $100 million of the outstanding taxes are owed by 201 companies that are still operating. There are nearly 80,000 inactive wells scattered across the province, some of which haven’t produced any oil or gas for decades, often leaching pollution in the ground and the air. Landowners with failing companies on their properties have to wait months for the government to reimburse unpaid leases. The government paid more than $150 million to cover lease obligations for private companies between 2010 and 2024 and in that time has recovered less than one per cent from those companies.
The mature asset strategy — developed to respond to many of these issues — has been controversial since it was first leaked to the media in March. Particularly controversial has been the possibility of creating a government entity that would take ownership of aging wells owned by derelict companies, dubbed “HarvestCo.” That and other proposals in the strategy could be government policy this fall. Those wells would either be transferred to the Orphan Well Association, sold to different private operators to run or be taken over by HarvestCo to wring whatever wealth is left in the ground, with the goal of funding their cleanup. Critics say it shifts all the risk onto taxpayers, while Marciano argues it would be an effective way for the government to reap financial rewards from old wells and help pay for cleanup. He said it would also help shut down bad operators, even if the process would seem to copy the business practices of companies that buy up cheap wells to reap profit and then disappear.
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https://thenarwhal.ca/alberta-oil-and-gas-meeting-warburg/