Watchdog says funds for oil well cleanups may fall short

• Funds allocated by the Canadian government to help clean up the country’s orphan oil and gas wells may fall short if the main oil-producing province of Alberta continues to allocate the money to financially viable companies, the parliamentary budgetary watchdog said on Tuesday.

About half the funds in Alberta went to 10 companies that are expected to remain financially viable over the next few years, including some of Canada’s largest energy producers — Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., Imperial Oil, and Cenovus Energy, budgetary officials said. All have benefited from surging oil prices.

The western provinces are dotted with hundreds of thousands of oil and gas wells. Some of those wells are orphans, meaning the firms that owned them have gone bankrupt or ceased to exist.

In April 2020, the federal Liberal government allocated $1.7 billion to clean up inactive oil and gas wells.

There are approximately 225,000 inactive and plugged wells in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Around 11,000 are orphans and the watchdog estimates the cleanup cost for those wells will reach $1.1 billion by 2025.

While the amount set aside by Ottawa should be enough to cover the orphan well cleanup cost, Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux warned the funding could fall short if Alberta continued to allocate federal money to firms that are not in financial trouble. “If that trend continues, it’s possible that the funding set aside would not be sufficient to clean up all of the inactive orphan wells into the future,” Giroux told a conference call.

Canada has a “polluter pays” principle, in which companies are expected to set aside funds to cover the cost of cleanup. Giroux noted the federal funding was set up to clean up inactive wells, not necessarily orphan wells, and it was up to Alberta to determine which firms received funding.

Alberta government spokesperson Jennifer Henshaw said the funds went directly to oilfield services companies specializing in well cleanup, rather than the well licensees. “The program has accelerated the cleaning up of inactive sites and has created more than 1,900 jobs,” Henshaw added.