By: Nigel Bankes and Heather Lilles

PDF Version: Independent Operations, Holdings and Common Ownership: A Letter Decision of the Alberta Energy Regulator

Decision Commented On: AER, Request for Regulatory Appeal by Westbrick Energy Ltd., Regulatory Appeal No. 1852713, 25 May 2016

Last week, ABlawg announced a new three-step project which will present the Alberta Energy Regulator’s (AER’s) published procedural and participatory letter decisions in a more usable and accessible form. As noted in that post, step one of the project, which collates the summaries of these decisions in a searchable PDF document, is now complete.

The objective of this post is to provide an example of the potentially valuable nuggets of information discoverable in this large group of decisions. The post concerns a letter decision which, while ostensibly dealing with procedural matters, also contains discussions of holdings, common ownership and independent operations within the meaning of the 1990 CAPL Operating Procedure. As such, the decision confirms the importance of publishing these decisions insofar as joint operating agreements (JOAs) are common in the industry as is the practice “going penalty”. But the decision also illustrates some confusion between the threshold question of standing and the decision on the merits. In this case it appears to us that the AER panel actually decided the merits of Westbrick’s application and then somewhat perversely denied it standing. Continue reading →

By: Nigel Bankes, Amy Matychuk, and David Rennie

PDF Version: Announcing a New Resource for the Letter Decisions of the Alberta Energy Regulator

Decisions Commented On: The Participatory/Procedural Decisions of the AER

Several years ago now, ABlawg published a series of posts that were critical of the failure of the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) and its predecessor the Energy Resources Conservation Board to publish its letter decisions in a systematic way: see here, here and here. Whether in response to that criticism, or for its own good reasons, the AER began posting what it refers to as participatory/procedural decisions (presumably a sub-set of a broader category of letter decisions) in the fall of 2015. When this venture began, the decisions were simply listed with no attached descriptor whatsoever. Now the AER does provide a brief description of the matter at hand but it is still a laborious task to click and retrieve each document and assess its significance.

Having asked the AER to provide this information it accordingly seemed appropriate to try and present it in a more usable and accessible form. Hence this project. The project has three steps. Step one is to provide a digest of each decision. Given the number of these decisions (already over 170) we have not attempted to synthesise or précis these decisions, rather the exercise has been more of a cut-and-paste job hewing closely to the AER’s actual text. We have added key words which are listed below. There is no additional commentary. The result of that exercise has been collated into a PDF document which is available here and is fully searchable. Step two will be to present this information as a set of web-pages. That is a work in progress. Step three will be to write what we anticipate will become a short annual survey of these decisions, assessing trends and perhaps highlighting some of the more important decisions. That too is a work in progress. It goes without saying that while step one is complete until the end of January 2017 we also aim to populate it with new decisions from time to time.

David Rennie (JD 2017) began this work as a summer student in 2016 preparing digests of the first 85 decisions and Amy Matychuk (JD 2018), also a summer student in 2016, continued the work for the latter part of the summer and through the fall. Nigel Bankes provided direction and supervision.

We hope that readers of ABlawg and other researchers will find this tool useful and we welcome your feedback, either by way of a comment on this post or to ndbankes@ucalgary.ca Continue reading →