Environmental accountability: avoidable methane and VOC contamination in Alberta’s oilpatch

Purpose This study examines how the Alberta government’s October 2000 withdrawal of the Long-Term Inactive Well Program and its replacement with the Licensee Liability Rating system enabled two decades of avoidable methane and volatile organic compound (VOC) contamination. It analyzes how accounting-based regulatory choices, co-participation between government and corporations and the withholding of environmental information facilitated the indefinite deferral of decommissioning and reclamation, producing major environmental and health consequences. Design/methodology/approach A total of 7,380 pages of internal government records obtained through a series of freedom-of-information (FOI) requests were integrated with well-level production data for 599,002 Alberta wells covering 1961–2018. After extensive cleaning and organization, these materials were used to reconstruct regulatory decision-making and to generate tables and spatial mapping of cumulative contamination patterns. Our analyses qualitatively interpret the documentary evidence to illuminate the accounting-implicated regulatory choices that shaped Alberta’s non-producing well problem and their environmental consequences. Findings The LLR’s design – originating in a proposal authored by a Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. employee and using reclamation costs supplied by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers – shifted regulatory focus from the timely decommissioning of non-producing wells to the management of financial risk to the orphan fund. This shift enabled wells to remain undecommissioned for decades, generating an estimated 2.3 million well-years of avoidable contamination. By 2018, nearly 10% of Alberta’s landmass lay within 500 m of a non-producing undecommissioned well, including First Nations reserves that had few such wells three decades earlier, and the regulator’s own internal calculations indicate that the 15 largest oilpatch corporations would, at current rates, require an average of 288 years to decommission their existing inventories of inactive wells. Originality/value This study is the first to integrate FOI-obtained regulatory records with privately purchased well-level data to map the cumulative, avoidable environmental consequences of accounting-implicated regulatory changes. It contends that in co-participatory settings of resource extraction and environmental degradation, where governments and corporations are structurally aligned through royalty dependence, accounting academics can and should seek to uncover, analyze and publicize environmental information that governments and corporations prefer to keep hidden and to place such information into the hands of audiences capable of mobilizing it within accountability struggles.