24 Comments

  1. The UCP will see this and cut a cheque for the oil and gas companies for $476 million just to ease their suffering.

  2. Every time I think about how well off a province like Alberta could be if us and the government profited off of the O&G industry instead of a bunch of rich people it makes me so sad 😭While I personally don’t like O&G and would much prefer solar, nuclear, wind, and hydro to be widely adopted it’s so dumb to just let all of the countries natural resource extraction to be private and not nationalized. All of the money made from it could be used to schools, healthcare, diversifying the economy more, and transitioning towards renewable energy.

  3. Not just O&G

    We taxpayers are paying a lot of money to clean up a mine site in the NWT that’s contaminated with enough Arsenic to kill every human on the planet several times over.

    The Gold mining company took out billions of gold, and then instantly declared bankruptcy when the ore ran out.

  4. KingOfTheIntertron on

    No way, they would never. My oil company is a good boy who never hurt nobody.

  5. This is like gun violence in the States:

     “it keeps happening, we keep doing nothing to prevent it, and we’re all out of ideas about why it never stops!”

  6. “Most environmentally friendly and ethically sourced oil”.

    Can the staunch defenders of the O&G industry please stop using that line? Thank you.

  7. ShanerThomas on

    The legislation needs to change — but I am not sure how you’d do that when politicos are paid off by lobbyists who own them.

    However, if it were to change, all the property of the business should be seized, then if the business went bankrupt, the private property of the business owner should also be seized.

  8. Guys guys guys – the biggest victim is the investors… won’t anyone think of the poor investors!

    To hell with all the taxpayers who will end up footing the bill.

  9. Right now companies are incentivized to suspended an oil well indefinitely and push abandonment as long as possible. The best case scenario for them is if they can package all These suspended wells and the abandonment obligation with a few wells that on their last legs and sell them to some small operator that will eventually go bankrupt.

    Ultimately I think that each oil well should have its own trust account that’s initially funded with some cash and a small percentage of the revenue from That we’ll goes into the trust account that’s released to the owner once a well Is fully abandoned and they get a certificate that says it was done correctly.

  10. More costs associated with Canada’s largest welfare project. Why don’t we work all of the Oil and gas subsidies into the calculations for the federal disparity payments? Instead of subsidizing the oil and gas industry we should bring back the federal subsidized housing program.

  11. SingleIndependence68 on

    Name a single renewable energy company that left behind more than a million dollar taxpayer funded mess.

    What a joke 🙄

  12. The only solution is to take the well reclamation out of the company’s control. Once the well is up and running the royalties would be increased till they pay for the cleanup. Once paid the royalties go back to normal. That unfortunately means that the government would have to take control of the cleanup and as we all know governments are incompetent at most things.

  13. -Mage-Knight- on

    Is this even news worthy? At this point I would assume any oil and gas company that didn’t leave their mess behind is confused about how things work in Alberta.

  14. Artistic-Tip2405 on

    The various levels of government that collected royalties need to pay for this.

  15. CanExplainThings on

    I worked in consulting for oil and gas around 2011. At that time, if we decommissioned *one site a day*, just of the ones no longer being used, it would take

    One hundred. Seventy six. Years. To do them all. 

    That was 15 years ago. 

  16. MethodicallyRight on

    Just remember, all this environmental red tape is just job killing Government overreach. We all have to remember that lowering the bar is the priority to make sure companies will invest in Canada and the mere threats of pulling out of pausing operations should be met with even more acquiescing.

    How ‘common sense solutions’ end up trying to discuss these issues in reality.

  17. But Joe Rogan said that isn’t true???

    Milhouse said it wasn’t true when Joe interviewed him.