Alberta has pledged to impose cleanup timelines on energy companies in a major policy shift to reduce growing financial and environmental risks tied to tens of thousands of idled oil and gas wells across the province. Energy Minister Margaret McCuaig-Boyd said on Monday she has also told the Alberta Energy Regulator to beef up oversight of energy companies’ financial health. But she stopped short of committing to legislative changes that would give the provincial regulator greater powers over corporate takeovers where the buyer has insufficient funds to meet cleanup obligations. “We absolutely are looking at targets and timelines" to ensure companies meet their cleanup obligations, she said in an interview. “Because for too long, operators were allowed to just punt these things down the road until the point there were no operators left to be responsible for them.” The commitment comes after a six-month Globe and Mail investigation published this weekend that revealed about 20 per cent of all oil and gas wells in British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan are inactive, and that there are 54,147 more idle wells in those three provinces than there were in 2005. Such wells no longer produce oil and gas, but have not […]
