Accelerate New Oil Wells, Abandon the Old Ones, All the While Burning | The Tyee
full swing. Premier Jason Kenney acts like a drunken host offering
exiting oil companies all manner of lavish inducements to stick around a
while longer.
The massive taxpayer exposure from abandoned wells pales in comparison to even larger liabilities accumulated from decades of lightly regulated bitumen mining. According to other internal figures from the Alberta Energy Regulator, reclaiming tailings ponds now covering 88 square kilometres and counting could cost a further $130 billion, assuming such a thing was even technically possible.
What to do? Apparently Ottawa and Alberta have hatched a plan to allow some bitumen producers to begin to dump tailings ponds into the Athabasca River. Decades of effort have failed to find a credible treatment option for the 1.3 trillion litres of toxic slurry built up since the 1970s. Yet oilsands firms may soon be authorized to release effluent treated by an as-yet-unproven technology into a river with one of the largest freshwater estuaries in the world. What could go wrong?