Alberta’s Premier Smith pushes oil well clean-up incentives forward in mandate letter

In a mandate letter to Alberta's energy minister, Premier Danielle Smith is making oil well clean up a top priority. She wants to incentivize companies to clean old sites.

Alberta’s premier is telling her energy minister to focus on oil well cleanup.

In Danielle Smith’s fourth mandate letter, she directed Brian Jean to explore incentives for oil companies to clean up old wells, and she wants that plan to respect the polluter pay principle.

“We have a whole bunch of abandoned wells that are sitting on people’s private property and public land, that are causing problems,” Jean told Global News in an interview.

He says the key is to find a solution and stop old oil and natural gas sites from being environmental hazards.

“We can cast blame on past actors, we can cast blame on past governments, but that is not going to get it solved.”

In Smith’s mandate letter to Jean, she asks him to start “developing a strategy to effectively incentivize reclamation of inactive legacy oil and natural gas sites, and to enable future drilling while respecting the principle of polluter pay.”

The province has previously proposed offering royalty breaks to oil companies, but did not have the polluter pay aspect embedded into the proposal. Regardless, Mount Royal University political scientist Lori Williams says it doesn’t make much sense.

“We have two very vague statements here and it isn’t at all clear how they at all go together,” Williams said.