Today, readers are talking about The Globe’s multi-month investigation Hustle in the oil patch: Inside a looming financial and environmental crisis.
A Sequoia well site near Ponoka, Alberta, November 3, 2018.Todd Korol/Globe and Mail
"Just a few years after the boom, energy companies are shedding distressed wells for next to nothing. It’s a brisk trade in junk assets — and it’s going virtually unchecked by regulators. Who will pay to clean it up?"
Not the oil companies. They’ll have packed up and gone. You and I will be stuck with a massive cleanup bill, the size of which will pale next to the potential liability costs. Albertans have been fleeced. The oil companies came in and took the oil, tossed a few royalties to the Alberta PC governments, and left a permanent poisoned province for someone else to clean up. - Thomas Darcy McGee
In response to Thomas Darcy McGee:
But that is the paradigmatic business strategy of oil and gas: Capture all the upside revenue for the private producer, and slough as many costs as possible onto the public purse. That is their entire business model. Most heavily subsidized industry on Earth. - OldBanister
What an excellent piece of investigative journalism. I was never aware of the back and forth and shady deals, the bankruptcies and the massive environmental clean up liability. - TorontoGooner
I don’t want to dismiss the extensive investigative journalism and work that went into this article, which deserves a long and careful reading and re-reading. But this was an open secret to anyone following the oil and gas industry. “Privatize profits, socialize costs” has been its mantra for decades, and governments have been its silent partners in ignoring environmental costs right from the start. - Mark Shore
Great reporting. The process of privatizing profit, pillaging the commons and socializing losses is how the extraction industries roll. And, as the writers note, "ultimately it has left taxpayers to shoulder a financial and environmental mess." It would one thing if there was a sovereign wealth fund that made Albertans real stakeholders. Instead, Albertans have been played for chumps by carpetbaggers and hustlers. - Moseby1
Excellent investigation. There were several references to the Alberta Energy Regulator which was once a respected regulatory agency when it was the original Energy Resources Conservation Board which made sure the energy industry obeyed the rules and served the best interests of the public. When the Klein government reformed the Board it became split between its responsibilities which resulted in a weakened regulatory agency in favour to a 'pedal to the metal' industry-friendly philosophy which worked as long as oil and gas prices were good and royalties helped balance a budget in the face of inadequate provincial revenues. When world prices tanked so did the mythical 'Alberta Advantage'. Happily, the Liberals and Justin Trudeau are now available to absorb every criticism and blame for the made-in-Alberta (and conservative governments') problem despite rescuing the Trans Mountain Pipeline project from oblivion. - Jimbo5
Privatize the profits and socialize the losses. The Canadian way. - CitizenWhoPaysTaxesNotTaxPayer
From: Oil patch fails to clean up growing stockpile of abandoned wells by Jeff Lewis and Chen Wang
I'll just add, that everyone Canadian without exception has benefited in a multitude of ways from these wells. Governments have collected royalties from the oil & natural gas extracted. Governments have collected taxation many times over from the oil & gas extracted. Every single Canadian has continually benefited from oil & gas extraction. Life absent of oil & natural gas would be vastly different, vastly inferior to the lives we lead today. Canadians really have no call to get their knickers in a knot about oil & gas extraction. Can we do better, absolutely! But let’s ensure we do better in a way that causes the least harm to everyone involved. - kbaumgart
We give our resources away for a pittance, and then get stuck holding the cleanup bag. The resource companies will sell the worthless assets to a foreign company that will shortly thereafter declare bankruptcy. The fix is in and we are being played for chumps. - M_G
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