Decision time is coming soon for the Kenney government as it faces a tangle of issues surrounding orphan wells, the future of the Alberta Energy Regulator and growing oilpatch liability concerns in the province.
Energy Minister Sonya Savage says the province will unveil “an entire suite of policies dealing with well licences and the liability” management issues before the end of March.
“We will be bringing forward a package in the near future that will look at the entire life cycle of wells.
“It’s everything from the beginning, from licensing to operations, to transfers of licences, to abandonment and reclamations, to the orphan wells — and even to post-closure and legacy sites,” she said in an interview this week.
“That will include things that can be done inside the AER and some things that will involve some regulatory and policy changes.”
Savage wouldn’t reveal specifics on where the government will end up on these complex issues, but a coherent policy is sorely needed on problems that have been decades in the making.
More than 450,000 oil and gas wells have been drilled over the past century and the cleanup of thousands of suspended wells has accumulated over the years without hard, fixed timelines on remediation.
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