With 5,200 direct jobs lost in the fossil sector since March, the government of Newfoundland is beginning to talk, tentatively, about reinventing itself as a green energy leader. Also on the horizon: finding answers to the murky question of who will pay to decommission the fossil infrastructure left behind.

“Just a few years ago, with oil at more than US$100 a barrel, St. John’s was a boom town, with a soaring real estate market, rapidly growing population, and pricey new restaurants fuelled by oil executives and their expense accounts,” writes the Globe and Mail. Today, with the province’s key export hovering in the low $40s, those executives are fuelling nothing but anxious speculation about when, if ever, billion-dollar oil projects will get the green light.

Noting that Husky Energy’s C$2.2-billion West White Rose extension is on hold until “at least 2022,” the Globe adds that “drilling on the iconic Hibernia platform, which launched the province’s oil industry, has been suspended since April as a cost-saving measure.”

And according to a recent report by the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board, that industry regulator “received zero bids for 16 of the 17 offshore parcels available for drilling in 2020—slashing planned exploration spending from oil companies to just $27 million, down from $1.3 billion in 2018.”

Source: As an Oil Un-Building Looms, Newfoundlanders Ask: What Next, and Who Pays? – The Energy Mix

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