Here’s a striking trivia factoid: the biggest dam in the world is in northern Alberta. If you rank dams by the amount of construction material piled into them, the winner is the Syncrude Tailings Dam in the oilsands. Much less trivial is the astonishing amount of toxic waste and looming cleanup costs swelling behind it and the many thousands of other fossil fuel operations spread across the land.

Canada’s oil and gas industry is steadily building an environmental time bomb. It’s one that communities, particularly First Nations downstream, have been struggling to highlight for many years. But now that it’s become a fiscal time bomb as well, maybe the money managers will get more traction. Most of these liabilities have been downplayed to investors and kept off the books but, last week, an investor advocacy group warned that Canadian oil and gas companies have a gaping blind spot in their accounting — one that could already exceed half the companies’ value, measured in market capitalization.

Investors for Paris Compliance wrote to the audit committee chairs at 14 big oil and gas companies ahead of their annual general meetings, putting them on notice about “material gaps” in their financial disclosures that amount to billions of dollars in decommissioning costs.

At the heart of the problem is a staggering liabilities gap between what companies disclose and what independent estimates suggest they truly owe to clean up old wells, oilsands operations and other industrial scars on the land. It’s hard to say how big the gap really is but a recent analysis by Investors for Paris Compliance arrived at a “conservative” estimate of about $113 billion.

[–] Sturgist@lemmy.ca 17 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Add onto that the very common practice of O&G companies playing shell games to leave Alberta with the bill for cleaning up spent wells.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_wells_in_Alberta,_Canada

From the wiki page:

The 100% industry-funded Alberta Energy Regulator (AER)—the sole regulator of the province's energy sector—manages licensing and enforcement related to the full lifecycle of oil and gas wells based on Alberta Environment Ministry requirements, including orphaned and abandoned wells.[5][6][7] Oil and gas licensees are liable for the responsible and safe closure and clean-up of their oil and gas well sites under the Polluter Pays Principle (PPP)[8] as a legal asset retirement obligation (ARO).[5][6][9][10] An operator's liability for surface reclamation issues continues for 25 years following the issuance of a site reclamation certificate. There is also a lifelong liability in case of contamination.[11][12]

Then just a liiiiiiittle further down the page:

As of March 2023, oil and gas companies owe rural municipalities $268 million in unpaid taxes;[17] they owe landowners "tens of millions in unpaid lease payments".[18] Original owners of what are now orphan wells "failed to fulfill their responsibility for costly end-of-life decommissioning and restoration work"; some sold these wells "strategically to insolvent operators".[18] Landowners suffer both "environmental and economic consequences" of having these wells on their property.[18] OWA funding is underfunded by at least several hundred million.[18] The total estimate for cleaning up all existing sites is as much as $260 billion. Remediation is paid for through federal and provincial bailouts, a PPP violation.[18]

Really wish Albertans understood how badly they're being hoses by O&G....

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

The thing is, people do know about it here. Add it to the list of unsustainable things about the industry people are willing to overlook because they're making great money today.

[–] Sturgist@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 month ago

🤦

[–] lemonySplit@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Shouldn't have consented to a well on your land if you were at all concerned with the environment you greedy fucks. Really zero sympathy for these jackoffs complaining. They were fine with ruining their land when they were getting paid lease money

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Not a fiscal time bomb for them if the liabilities can be socialised to the gov't and local communities as they have been so far. Given the scale, I think we'd keep extracting while ignoring the cleanup costs, until that no longer makes financial sense. Then we'd abandon the area with or without helping local communities to migrate.

[–] streetfestival@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If we never make polluters pay their fair share, why would they think they'll ever have to? ffs

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

They wouldn't. I think I'm coming to terms with the thought that all the talk of making polluters pay has just been there to manufacture consent for the extraction by calming the population that it'll be taken care of. Kinda like the drcades-long plastic recycling campaigns that resulted in barely making a dent. It's a terrible thought but perhaps if more people come to terms with it we'd demand different social contract for such economic activities.

[–] streetfestival@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 month ago

Totally agree with everything you've said

I think I’m coming to terms with the thought that all the talk of making polluters pay has just been there to manufacture consent for the extraction by calming the population that it’ll be taken care of

Kinda like 'carbon capture' 🤪