The parliamentary budget officer has found the cost of cleaning up orphaned oil and gas wells in Alberta and Saskatchewan already dwarfs the money collected from industry to pay for it.
But critics immediately called Yves Giroux’s estimated $1 billion by 2025 price tag a massive underestimate.
“It’s a great disappointment,” said Regan Boychuk of the Alberta Liabilities Disclosure Project, a group whose research was cited in Giroux’s report.
“They left out the most expensive part.”
The report considers about 10,000 wells in Alberta and Saskatchewan that are considered orphans — those with no viable operator capable of addressing their environmental
