Derp derp subsidizing green energy is communism

[revkevsdi]

"Academics at the University of Calgary are calling for a public review of the Alberta Energy Regulator, describing it as secretive and too close to industry.

In a peer-reviewed report issued by the university’s School For Public Policy, three authors examine what they call a “massive policy failure” in dealing with the large and growing environmental liability left by the province’s oil and gas industry.

“There needs to be an inquiry of some kind,” said co-author and resource law professor Martin Olszynski. “Albertans don’t have the information they need.”

A spokeswoman for the regulator said recent programs funded by industry and government have improved spending on reclamation.

“Over $1 billion was spent on closure activities in 2022,” said Teresa Broughton in an email.

Alberta has about 230,000 drilled wells that need to be abandoned and reclaimed. Another 90,000 have been abandoned but not reclaimed.

That liability is estimated to be at least $60 billion. Some estimates double that.

The university report concludes that liability is the result of years of regulatory cosiness with industry.

“You have 30 years of essentially bilateral meetings between industry and the regulator,” Olszynski said. “The records we do have show very clearly how an initial policy would be proposed by government and then over the course of 20 or 30 meetings a very different policy emerges.”

As well, the report says too many of Alberta’s environmental requirements are left to the regulator’s discretion.

Legislation requires companies to clean up after themselves, but that obligation comes only after an order from the regulator. Although the province now has reclamation spending targets for industry, those targets are also set at the regulator’s discretion.

The report says the word “may” — as in “the regulator may prescribe conditions” — appears 190 times in Alberta’s Oil and Gas Conservation Act, 84 times in its Pipeline Act and 437 times in its Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act.

Alberta once had a requirement that all wells inactive for more than 10 years be abandoned, placed back into production or have financial security posted for their abandonment. That program was cancelled in 2000.

“The absence of legislated time frames for closure work means that, in almost all cases, the work is only conducted either voluntarily by the licensee or when the regulator issues an order,” the report says.

Broughton said the regulator is working on the problem and now has mandatory requirements for spending on well closure and remediation.

“Mandatory closure spend quotas specify the minimum amount of money that licensees are required to spend on closure work each year,” she said.

That requirement has grown to $700 million in 2024, from $422 million in 2022. In 2022, 4,461 sites received reclamation certificates, an increase of a third over the previous year.

However, the report says that requirement is also set at the regulator’s discretion and the 2024 target is lower than the $764 million forecast when the program was set out. The percentage of spending required is also significantly lower for operators deemed financially at risk.

The report criticizes how the regulator has, over the years, choked off the information it releases around the financial health of companies acquiring oil and gas leases.

The regulator used to post how much security each company had posted, as well as its score on the system used to assess ability to clean up old sites. The information on security was no longer posted after 2010 and individual liability scores were kept private after 2019, says the report.

The report also criticizes the Orphan Well Fund, an industry-funded and -run group that is supposed to oversee the reclamation of wells for which no owner exists. The authors say the fund’s board is dominated by industry and is exempt from freedom of information legislation despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in public funding in recent years.

The solutions to Alberta’s huge unfunded environmental liability aren’t going to be easy, said Olszynski. Some may feel the economic benefits are worth it, he said.

But he said no informed debate is possible under the current regime.

“We don’t know enough about how this came to be,” Olszynski said.

“How is it that over 20 years, the inactive well inventory mushroomed and nobody decided this was a problem?”

-Calgary Herald

[Deephaven]

Nobody is going to read that fodder.

[revkevsdi]

18 minutes ago, Deephaven said:

Nobody is going to read that fodder.

Obviously not. The right hates facts. 

[Deephaven]

It's a fucking incoherent book that you weren't even smart enough to summarize.  Oh, how exciting.  Let's read that shit!  Fucking dumbass.

[BOHICA]

Lots and lots of tax payer dollars in US going to this.  California passed a law requiring that the oil companies must provide a bond for any well to pay for the cost of retiring it.

[spin_dry]

25 minutes ago, Deephaven said:

It's a fucking incoherent book that you weren't even smart enough to summarize.  Oh, how exciting.  Let's read that shit!  Fucking dumbass.

It’s actually very easy reading. 

[Deephaven]

6 minutes ago, spin_dry said:

It’s actually very easy reading. 

Figures you'd be dumb enough to bother.

[spin_dry]

2 minutes ago, Deephaven said:

Figures you'd be dumb enough to bother.

There’s a problem with a company extracting billions of dollars and then needing to clean up after themselves? Seems like a pretty simple concept to me. I’ve been to some back country areas in Alberta and seen the fucking mess mining and petro left behind. Disgusting. 

[revkevsdi]

1 hour ago, Deephaven said:

It's a fucking incoherent book that you weren't even smart enough to summarize.  Oh, how exciting.  Let's read that shit!  Fucking dumbass.

How low is your reading comprehension? It’s a straight forward article. I can give you the dumbed down version. 

Foreign oil companies use loophole so Billions of taxpayer money goes to cleaning up their environmental mess. 
 

There are a few big words that you may struggle with. Ask a six grader for help. 

[p51mstg]

"Green" solar and wind create their own waste that nobody is cleaning up.  

The safest and cleanest energy source that's scalable and sustainable - by far - is nuclear.

[Deephaven]

1 hour ago, revkevsdi said:

How low is your reading comprehension? It’s a straight forward article. I can give you the dumbed down version. 

Foreign oil companies use loophole so Billions of taxpayer money goes to cleaning up their environmental mess. 
 

There are a few big words that you may struggle with. Ask a six grader for help. 

It's your link, not worth reading.  And imagine that, your summary doesn't match your title.  Whodathunk.

[01mxz800]

dems when facts are brought into the mix

[Kivalo]

3 hours ago, Deephaven said:

It's a fucking incoherent book that you weren't even smart enough to summarize.  Oh, how exciting.  Let's read that shit!  Fucking dumbass.

He didn't read it, he read a summary of it written by someone else.

[spin_dry]

1 hour ago, p51mstg said:

"Green" solar and wind create their own waste that nobody is cleaning up.  

The safest and cleanest energy source that's scalable and sustainable - by far - is nuclear.

Do you want the waste in your back yard? The problem is that none of the states want to store a poison that lasts a few thousand years. Nuclear is also the most subsidized of all energy. We get to pay for it twice and three times. 

[spin_dry]

Just give the oil companies free rein to do whatever they want. Zero regulations. What could possibly go wrong? Fucking idiots. 

[BOHICA]

1 hour ago, p51mstg said:

"Green" solar and wind create their own waste that nobody is cleaning up.  

The safest and cleanest energy source that's scalable and sustainable - by far - is nuclear.

Usually Solar and wind waste in the us goes to landfills and is non toxic.

[revkevsdi]

1 hour ago, Deephaven said:

It's your link, not worth reading.  And imagine that, your summary doesn't match your title.  Whodathunk.

Maybe you’ll like this link. Stephen Harper stacked their board with conservatives a few years back. 
 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/orphan-wells-alberta-aldp-aer-1.5089254

 

70 billion, that’s a lot of taxpayer money. 

[Deephaven]

Maybe nobody will click on that either.

What is with the complete lack of capability of members of this board to have a discussion.  Summarize your point and try for once.  Pathetic shit 

[p51mstg]

1 hour ago, spin_dry said:

Do you want the waste in your back yard? The problem is that none of the states want to store a poison that lasts a few thousand years. Nuclear is also the most subsidized of all energy. We get to pay for it twice and three times. 

There'd be no nuclear "waste" in anyone's yard.  Spent nuclear fuel can be stored on site.  New nuke plants (Gen IV) can use that as fuel.  We have enough "spent" fuel right now to power the United States for 100 years, if it's used for Gen IV reactors, which is about how long those reactors would last.  By the time the reactors are finally done with the fuel, I'm not sure how much radioactivity would be left, but it would definitely be far less than it is now, probably less than the original uranium when it was taken out of the earth. 

Gen IV reactors can be built on the same sites as existing reactors, meaning the fuel doesn't have to be moved over public roads.  In 100 years, I'd hope that we could finally develop a truly green energy source that doesn't require fossil fuel to make it and dispose of it.  The energy density, reliability and consistency of nuclear energy makes it a far superior choice until that time comes - far better than an energy source depends on the weather, destroys wildlife and could be contributing to global warming.

We're decades away from our first fusion reactor, and that's assuming they're very close to something that actually could work.  Wind and solar will destroy the planet before they can save it.  Nuclear is the only way.

[spin_dry]

4 minutes ago, p51mstg said:

There'd be no nuclear "waste" in anyone's yard.  Spent nuclear fuel can be stored on site.  New nuke plants (Gen IV) can use that as fuel.  We have enough "spent" fuel right now to power the United States for 100 years, if it's used for Gen IV reactors, which is about how long those reactors would last.  By the time the reactors are finally done with the fuel, I'm not sure how much radioactivity would be left, but it would definitely be far less than it is now, probably less than the original uranium when it was taken out of the earth. 

Gen IV reactors can be built on the same sites as existing reactors, meaning the fuel doesn't have to be moved over public roads.  In 100 years, I'd hope that we could finally develop a truly green energy source that doesn't require fossil fuel to make it and dispose of it.  The energy density, reliability and consistency of nuclear energy makes it a far superior choice until that time comes - far better than an energy source depends on the weather, destroys wildlife and could be contributing to global warming.

We're decades away from our first fusion reactor, and that's assuming they're very close to something that actually could work.  Wind and solar will destroy the planet before they can save it.  Nuclear is the only way.

That’s all pie in the sky stuff. 

[p51mstg]

15 minutes ago, spin_dry said:

That’s all pie in the sky stuff. 

Really?

Let's see what Mr. Lefty Global Warming says about that....

Or, Mr. Tree Hugger Climate Activist....

It's pretty interesting stuff.  Fusion - the only thing we have right now that looks like the best solution on paper - is still pie in the sky.  But, fission is here right now.  I think that's exciting.

I think everyone is making a valid point about questioning what the government - and, thus, tax payers - is paying for.  Unfortunately, the accusation that the other side has resorted to communism to fund what they think is right is just a smoke screen for actual dialog.  We should question what they're spending money on - we should question what they're doing and do that more often.  We don't need to call people names if we disagree with them.

[Rod]

It’s fascist not communist 

[BOHICA]

Government should put a fee on every gallon of gas pumped for all the subsidies the oil industry recieves instead of the taxpayers have to un willfully sucking up and paying for it. 

[Doug]

https://www.marketplace.org/2023/09/12/as-gas-taxes-dwindle-states-seek-ways-to-charge-evs/

[BOHICA]

8 minutes ago, Doug said:

https://www.marketplace.org/2023/09/12/as-gas-taxes-dwindle-states-seek-ways-to-charge-evs/

Interesting…. From your link.  
 

Another option? Taxing kilowatt-hours at charging stations. But Garett Shrode with the Eno Center for Transportation said that approach has its pitfalls because “80% of electric vehicle charging happens at the home and not at public chargers.”