A central Alberta cattle rancher with dozens of inactive oil and gas wells on his property says rural landowners need to stop welcoming companies to drill on their land until they clean up their mess.
Bill Heidecker, in his capacity as president of the Alberta Surface Rights Federation, penned a 10-page letter Thursday to Premier Danielle Smith laying out his rationalization for refusing to play ball with the fossil fuel industry.
“We’re pissed and we’ve had enough,” he said in an interview. “All of our behind-closed-door conversations with the province have been ignored, so we’ve got no choice now. We’ve got to go public and start telling landowners that you’re going to have to take action to protect yourself.”
Heidecker argues that the “grand bargain” under which property owners are required to grant access for fossil fuel extraction in exchange for industry assuming responsibility for lease payments, environmental oversight and reclamation has been repeatedly breached in recent years.
Landowners, Heidecker’s letter reads, are subject “to an increasingly one-sided arrangement under which industry seeks greater access, greater flexibility and fewer obligations while those who host its operations are expected to accept the resulting risks, disruption and liabilities.”
“This imbalance is no longer tolerable,” he added.
The letter notes a variety of issues that have gone unaddressed, including weeds sprouting on well sites, “unmaintained and unsafe infrastructure,” shoddy and delayed reclamation, unpaid leases and municipal property taxes, excessive water diversion, and regulatory bodies failing to provide adequate oversight.
“It’s just been a slippery slope, getting worse and worse and worse for us now,” Heidecker told The Orchard.
These issues must be resolved, he argues, before embarking on the major increase in oil and gas extraction that the government has planned, including the Pacific Link tar sands pipeline, CO2 pipelines associated with the Pathways storage hub and gas-guzzling AI data centres.
Because of the government’s inaction on landowner rights issues, the federation will “actively recommend that landowners resist further energy development on their lands and in their surrounding areas,” reads the letter.
Heidecker is part of a coalition of landowners taking the Alberta Energy Regulator to court for vastly underfunding the Orphan Well Association, the industry-funded entity that cleans up inactive wells owned by bankrupted companies.
The province’s Mature Asset Strategy, which attempts to accelerate the cleanup of the province’s 77,354 inactive wells, was drafted with heavy input from the oil and gas industry and doesn’t adequately address landowners’ concerns, said Heidecker.
The strategy has been overseen by David Yager, the former CEO of a company that plugs wells prior to reclamation. He’s a special advisor to Premier Danielle Smith, who has appointed him to write three reports on the oil and gas industry, including the Mature Asset Strategy, and to sit on the board of the Alberta Energy Regulator.
While the Surface Rights Federation was invited to participate in one of six working groups established by the Ministry of Energy and Minerals to provide input for the strategy, the oil and gas industry had representatives in all six groups.
But now that Yager has begun consultations for the strategy’s implementation phase, landowner rights advocates have been iced out entirely.
In his letter, Heidecker identifies this “extraordinary and indefensible decision” as the “final straw” for the Surface Rights Federation’s willingness to collaborate with government and industry.
He explains:
To involve industry in the development of implementing policy while excluding the people whose land, livelihoods and property rights are directly affected would demonstrate precisely the institutional imbalance we have repeatedly asked your government to correct. Landowners cannot be treated as a stakeholder to be consulted during the public-facing stage and then disregarded when decisions are made. [Emphasis in original text.]
Consultations on planned changes to the Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act have also excluded landowner advocacy groups, adding insult to injury.
“If we're out in the cold, it's a different ball game,” Heidecker told this newsletter.
Landowners cannot outright reject extraction on their property, but refusal to co-operate will force companies to obtain an order from the Land and Property Rights Tribunal, which gives landowners the ability to ask the tribunal for tougher conditions for accessing their land.
It’s also a costly and time-consuming process for companies, which could incentivize them to cut better deals with landowners.
“The only things that these people listen to are votes and money,” Heidecker explained, referring to the government and industry, respectively.
“We're going to have to make it cost them some money or make it cost them some votes. That seems to be our only option.”
The federation proposes several conditions, including an upfront payment for reclamation that matches those the government requires of renewable energy producers, the right to request regular reports into a producer’s financial health and ability to meet its obligations to the landowner and requiring the landowner’s consent for any license transfers to another company.
In addition to the premier, Heidecker’s letter was sent to all of Alberta’s MLAs, Prime Minister Mark Carney, federal Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson and several agricultural industry groups.
Read it in full below.
Evidently Alberta oil and gas oligarcs and their minions have no respect for your “private property” or the ultra thin envelope of atmosphere surrounding our planet that is the sum total of our environment, our home.
Wow, this seems like a big deal.