Quote from Steve MacLellan on May 6, 2025, 3:11 pm

Critics warn that taxpayers and local communities could be on the hook for cleaning up a growing inventory of abandoned oil wells and fossil fuel infrastructure in Alberta under a new “mature assets” strategy proposed by industry veteran David Yager.

The report, published in April, reflects a well-known pattern the industry has used for decades to avoid responsibility for clean-up costs.

Yager’s report acknowledges the scale of the problem: the province houses more than 270,000 wellbores that are barely profitable, inactive, or decommissioned—with reclamation not yet complete. In addition, about half of the 38,000 production facilities built by the industry are inactive or decommissioned, but not reclaimed. And about 40% of the 440,000 kilometres of pipelines criss-crossing the province are decommissioned or not operating.

This aging infrastructure hasn’t been properly cleaned up and poses environmental and financial risks—yet industry players have so far largely avoided the full cost of closure. Yager’s advice, now being reviewed by the province, on how to deal with these “mature assets” align with industry interests: extract more value from old wells and extend their life, speed up reclamation by adopting “flexible regulatory frameworks,” breathe “new life” into a challenged sector with higher gas prices that reflect well closure costs, and introduce asset insurance that could be managed by the province.

Some of these strategies are part of a well-documented “playbook” used by oil and gas producers in the Permian Basin, reported ProPublica in December.

Oil and gas producers—having received generous government subsidies and tax breaks to pump oil profitably—sidestep their cleanup obligations through asset transfers and legal loopholes. |Read more|

This is the exact same type of thing that will happen in Nova Scotia, if the moratorium on fracking is lifted, and companies start looking to the provincial government for subsidies.