Alberta’s orphan well woes are about to swell following the end of a controversial court case involving some of the biggest names in the Canadian oilpatch.
The province’s Orphan Well Association (OWA) is tasked with cleaning up oil and natural gas wells that no longer have an owner, something that is often caused by a company going bankrupt.
The OWA already has an inventory of about 1,600 wells in need of closure and reclamation. That workload is expected to more than double as the bankruptcy of Sequoia Resources is finally settled — a court case that has been followed closely by many because of its broad implications for landowners, industry and taxpayers.
With Sequoia, the OWA is expecting to inherit 1,800 to 2,000 more wells, in addition to the company’s other infrastructure, such as pipelines. The estimated clean-up cost of the Sequoia properties is about $200 million.
Cue Smith crying to Ottawa that Hellberta needs federal funding to take care of all those orphan wells.
I don’t get why they don’t have to pre-pay before they get to drill
They do pay some, thats how the orphan well association is funded.
But the payments are inadequate, so the OWA is woefully underfunded.
If I have to pay a deposit to my landlord, they need to pay a deposit to the owner of the land they’re on.
It should be enough to either fully remediate the land back to the state it was in before the rental, or to support a lawsuit to compel that remediation.
PER WELL.
But that would cut into revenue for the government. Much easier to blame them for failing to clean up later when cash is already in hand.
Find the guys who signed the paperwork to build the well, chain them to it. Make them spend a year cleaning up by hand before we have to start paying for it.
Cute of you to assume the regime would this to themselves lol
Some Texas two-step-like shenanigans going on. Like yeah, for reasons totally unrelated to the court case all our money left the company and somehow appeared in Company 2, totally separate, we have no control. Oh, we settled? Okay we’re one company again.
Everybody gangsta about the free market until the PoPo come knocking
Conservativism should also mean that if you make a mess, you clean it up, rather than passing the buck and letting the government pick up the tab.
Just make the taxpayers pay for the clean up. We would not want to hurt real people’s profit now…
