The president of Alberta’s fossil fuel industry regulator is resigning one day after the organization publicly apologized for the alarm caused by its $260-billion estimate of financial liabilities in the province’s oilpatch.
The Alberta Energy Regulator is apologizing for a “staggering” presentation, made last February by one of its highest-ranking officials, warning the province’s oilpatch that it could be sitting on an estimated $260 billion in financial liabilities.
The staggering estimate of $260 billion in financial liabilities for the oil and gas industry’s graveyard of spent facilities were spelled out by a high-ranking official of the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) in a February presentation to a private audience in Calgary.
A month after being ordered to pay $750,000 in fines related to a 2015 pipeline leak, Nexen Energy is reporting a spill of 270,000 litres from a different pipeline at the same northern Alberta project.
Oil and gas producer ConocoPhillips Canada is being fined $180,000 for a 2016 pipeline leak that spilled a light petroleum liquid into a remote area of northwestern Alberta.
New technologies employing brute force as well as artificial volcanic action are being developed to better seal thousands of inactive oil and gas wells in Canada that are leaking methane, a greenhouse gas with an outsized impact on global warming.
Energy Minister Margaret McCuaig-Boyd said during a news conference that the change would have an impact on any operators or oilpatch officials who have a history of going bankrupt and leaving taxpayers with the bill for the cleanup.
The cost of looking after hundreds of wells, pipelines and other oilfield gear left behind by bankrupt Lexin Resources Ltd. has exceeded $2 million and the bills continue to roll in, says Alberta's Orphan Well Association.
One of the country's largest oilsands companies is facing federal charges in the death of 31 great blue herons at one of its mine sites in northern Alberta more than two years ago.