The provincial government of Alberta, Canada’s key oil and gas-producing province, has advised the Alberta Energy Regulator to go soft on imposing penalties for excess flaring, Reuters reported on Monday, citing documents it had obtained through access to information laws.
The provincial government has urged the regulator to take a “softer” tone in communication with companies that are found to have exceeded the flaring limit, according to the documents Reuters has reviewed.
Moreover, the regulator was advised to take a “humble and collaborative” approach to communicating with companies.
In June, the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) issued a bulletin to announce the “removal of the provincial solution gas flaring limit,” per a ministerial order by Alberta’s Environment Minister Rebecca Shulz.
In the two years before scrapping the flaring limit, Alberta saw that limit exceeded by energy companies in both 2023 and 2024, according to a Reuters analysis of data from the AER.
Now the province has removed the limit because it believes that the rule from 20 years ago does not reflect the jump in Alberta’s oil production in the past two decades or other efforts to cut emissions, Ryan Fournier, a spokesperson for Environment Minister Shulz, said in June.
In another win for the oil and gas industry, the federal government of Canada signaled in November that it plans to scrap the previous cabinet’s controversial emissions cap plan, which had put former PM Justin Trudeau on a collision course with the provincial government of oil-producing Alberta.
Mark Carney’s federal government has introduced an update on the Oil and Gas Emissions Cap in the budget 2025 plan, saying that it would prioritize the creation of effective carbon markets.
The government’s Climate Competitiveness Strategy in Budget 2025 acknowledges the need to reduce emissions from the oil and gas sector to ensure Canada has access to markets that prioritize sustainability.
Carney’s climate strategy is “based on driving investment, not on prohibitions, and on results, not objectives,” the plan says.
“Effective carbon markets, enhanced oil and gas methane regulations, and the deployment at scale of technologies such as carbon capture and storage would create the circumstances whereby the oil and gas emissions cap would no longer be required as it would have marginal value in reducing emissions,” according to the new strategy.
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com
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