Regulator to study aging energy hardware
Alberta’s energy regulator is studying the risks posed by the province’s aging energy hardware.
“Aging infrastructure is an issue for the province,” said Jim Ellis, head of the agency which released a three-year strategic plan this week.
Ellis said the regulator has already compiled a database that locates and assesses Alberta’s thousands of abandoned wells. Now it’s time to do the same for pipelines, wellheads, compressor stations and all the other industrial facilities a century of energy development has left on the province’s landscape, he said.
“We now have a database on what wells there are, what state they’re in,” Ellis said. “What we’re going to do is move that ... to pipelines, all subsurface infrastructure, and then the surface infrastructure. That’s going to take us a little bit of time.”
The database is to be compiled from agencies that preceded the current regulator, which brought together three different bodies in 2013. By the time it’s complete in March 2018, the database will detail the age, location and condition of about 415,000 kilometres of pipe and 50,000 oil and gas facilities.
The facilities — especially pipelines — will be ranked according to the human health and environmental risks they pose and dealt with accordingly, said Ellis.
He pointed to the effort his agency is already making on cleaning up 37,000 abandoned wells that dot Alberta. By January, he said, 6,800 such sites had been cleaned up.
Targets and procedures for pipeline cleanups are being developed.
The regulator also hopes to increase public confidence in its work.
“One of the things I want to do over the next couple of years is to refocus on indigenous people,” said Ellis. “As a regulator, we can do a better job.”