Internal documents from Alberta’s energy regulator suggest the province’s environmental liability for hundreds of thousands of oil and gas wells could be nearly triple the figure the agency announced earlier this week.
In a report released Wednesday, the Alberta Energy Regulator said the cost of cleaning up the province’s 466,000 wells would be $33.3 billion. That figure is derived partly from estimates of what it would cost to remediate individual wells in different areas of the province, contained in a 2015 document called Directive 11.
But in 2018, the agency produced discussion papers on something called the Closure Liability Assessment Model, designed
