By: Drew Yewchuk
Matter Commented On: “A Made-in-Alberta Failure: Unfunded Oil and Gas Closure Liability” School of Public Policy Paper Series, October 2023
PDF Version: Freedom of Information: Brokering Access for Records on Oil and Gas Liability Management at the AER
This blog post is a companion to “A Made-in-Alberta Failure: Unfunded Oil and Gas Closure Liability”, a research paper Martin Olszynski, Shaun Fluker, and I wrote for the School of Public Policy. The paper describes the decades of regulatory failure in Albertan policy on inactive and orphan oil and gas wells and identifies the core deficiencies in the regulatory approach. This post provides a summary of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, RSA 2000, c F-25 (FOIP) access brokering process with the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) for the records obtained for writing that paper. Altogether, more than 1,500 pages of records were obtained through FOIP, although that includes a large number of duplicated pages. The documents cited in the research paper are attached to the paper as an appendix.