Dwight Popowich, an alfalfa farmer near Two Hills, Alberta, has tried for eight years to get an orphaned well on his property cleaned up. He says cleanup will take another 10 to 12 years at the rate things are going.
Now, instead of waiting, he’s going after the industry regulator that he believes has been a source of his woes.
On July 22, Popowich filed a conflict-of-interest investigation request against David Yager, an advisor to the premier who also wrote the Mature Assets Strategy for the Alberta Energy Regulator earlier this year.
His request argues that Yager has breached Alberta’s Conflict of Interest Act for fulfilling roles as an advisor to both government and the energy industry.
“This isn’t just about the well on my land — it’s a betrayal of every Albertan who trusted our government to do the right thing,” Popowich said in a press release.
“Like thousands of other landowners across Alberta, I trusted the oil and gas companies to clean up their messes. Instead, they’re leaving us with unsafe wells and no answers, all while our government and regulators repeatedly bend the rules and weaken the safety nets put in place to protect us.”
Who is David Yager?
The Mature Assets Strategy, chaired by Yager outlines how the province should deal with its abandoned and orphaned wells – the cleanup costs of which may be at least $60 billion, according to the School of Public Policy.
The report suggests that cleanup costs might be passed on to the public, critics argue.
It proposes a legacy asset insurance fund to help pay for cleanup, which would be “financed by contributions from licensees but managed by the province.”
A leaked early draft came under fire for saying that the fund would be “ultimately backstopped by the province.”
While the current wording shows an improvement, the report’s suggestion that the fund will be managed by the province still implies that the Alberta government might use public money to support the fund.
The report’s proposed cuts to cleanup standards and environmental regulations “would make it cheaper for industry, at the expense of Albertans’ health and safety,” notes Ecojustice in a press release.
Conflict of interest
Yager has worked in oil and gas for over fifty years, first as the founder of several oilfield service companies and then as a policy writer and journalist.
In recent years, he’s been awarded four sole-source contracts worth hundreds of thousands to review the Alberta Energy Regulator and draft the Mature Assets Strategy.
Rules on the Alberta government website state that sole-source contracts are allowed if it can be proven that only one supplier is qualified to deliver what the government needs.
Yager is also a special adviser to the premier.
Danielle Smith defended having Yager both review industry and advise government by saying no one has a more in-depth understanding of Alberta’s oil and gas industry than he does.
“There are very, very few individuals who know the industry as well as he does. That is what I have discovered as I have been learning the industry myself,” she told the Alberta legislature on March 18.
Still, some farmers would like to see better separation between industry and state.
“It is inappropriate to have an unabashed energy insider generating policies to address the Mature Asset Crisis, which is the result of decades of energy industry influence on government,” said Bill Heidecker, a farmer outside of Coronation, Alberta, and president of the Alberta Surface Rights Foundation in a press release.
Polluters pay principle
According to Alberta law, industries that create pollution in the province are responsible to pay for cleanup costs.
It’s a principle most five year olds would understand – if you make a mess, you have to clean it up.
In recent years, many companies have been shirking their responsibility. Some abandon their wells or go bankrupt before they are able to undertake cleanup procedures. Some have been lobbying the government to reduce cleanup standards.
Still, companies should not be surprised when they must spend some money at the end of a well’s life to clean it up.
“The rules were in place when these companies drilled or purchased the wells, right? So they knew full well what the requirements were,” Heidecker noted in an interview with TheRockies.Life.
Not the only landowner
Dwight Popowitch is not the only landowner complaining about how abandoned wells have been affecting his property.
Bill Heidecker spoke of how wells on his own property take away from his legal right to peaceful enjoyment of his property.
“I’ve got pieces of land that I avoid if I know an energy company is out there,” he told TheRockies.Life.
Jeff Glazer, Heidecker’s neighbour and a cattle farmer, tells a similar story.
“Even the stuff that Orphan Wells has cleaned up, the job is so horrible that you can’t farm it,” Glazer told TheRockies.Life.
“I can’t think of a piece of land we have that doesn’t have something on it that requires attention.”
Popowich and his lawyers are hoping the conflict of interest investigation pushes the AER to hold polluters to their agreement to pay for cleanup costs.
