This is the best summary I could come up with:

Alberta continues to mishandle end-of-life rules that govern inactive oil and gas wells, and the system the province uses must undergo an independent public inquiry to avoid financial and environmental catastrophe, according to a new analysis.

Their report, titled A Made-in-Alberta Failure, written by researchers Drew Yewchuk, Shaun Fluker and Martin Olszynski, concludes that the province’s inactive and orphan oil and gas well problem is “an immense environmental and financial crisis that has been unsuccessfully dealt with by various policies over several decades.”

“In the absence of significant and immediate legal and policy reforms, the coming years and decades will see the enormous environmental, social and economic costs of this regulatory failure fall on the province’s taxpayers,” it says.

Co-author Martin Olszynski, an associate law professor at the University of Calgary, said in an interview that Alberta’s unfunded oil and gas liabilities problem is “a complete regulatory failure.” And the first step in fixing it is a public inquiry to shine light on what happened and the options going forward, he said.

Asked whether it is transparent enough about the scale of Alberta’s liabilities issue, the AER said in an email that it has published information on how much the conventional oil and gas sector spent on closure activity in 2022, as well as progress on site clean-up.

Earlier this year, Premier Danielle Smith tasked her new Energy and Minerals Minister with “developing a strategy to effectively incentivize reclamation of inactive legacy oil and natural gas sites,” and work with the AER to “improve and modernize” processes around a new Liability Management Framework.

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