Surface rights group staging meeting
Unpaid rent, how oil companies are still profiting with low oil prices, and orphan wells.
That’s what officials with the Action Surface Rights Association have planned as topics for their annual general meeting, set for Wednesday in Taber.
Merv Cradduck, spokesperson for Action Surface Rights, is hoping to see landowners attending the AGM in Taber from across southern Alberta.
“We want to see as many people out as possible,” he said. “There’s only three or four surface rights groups in all of Alberta with a similar strength as us. A lot of groups are very small and don’t have as much financial resources.”
Guest speakers for the AGM will include Michele Del Colle, energy, utilities and policy specialist with the Farmers Advocate Office.
She will address the topic of collecting unpaid rentals and other problems that have arisen especially in the last six months for landowners, such as how to deal with being stuck with unpaid power bills when oil and gas companies leave the area or go bankrupt.
A second speaker for the afternoon will be Regan Boychuk, an independent researcher who sat on one of the royalty review’s advisory expert panels.
Cradduck says Boychuk will explain how oil companies are still making a profit even when oil is at $50 a barrel.
The third speaker will be Daryl Bennett, who is on the board of the Action Surface Rights. He will speak about the issues around the Licensed Liability Rating (LLR) system and how that affects landowners as well as the decommissioning of wind towers and the problem of unpaid taxes by oil companies which have gone bankrupt.
Cradduck explains the LLR system can be somewhat complex to understand, but it does overlap with the issue of orphan wells which has become more prominent the past six months.
According to information found by Cradduck, provided by the Alberta Energy Regulator, Alberta has about $30 billion in liabilities because of orphan wells. Based on an oil and gas company’s LLR rating, money is paid into an orphan well association in the form of a levy. That money is then to be used to help clean up orphan wells. Through that association, there is $30 million a year provided for an orphan well cleanup program.
“Officials want to see it increased to $60 million,” explains Cradduck. “We really don’t know how many orphan wells there are in this province.”
The problem with the LLR rating, which Bennett will speak to, is that a company’s assets may have been overvalued and liabilities undervalued.
Each speaker will have about 20 minutes to share his or her message, and then there will be time for questions from the audience.
The AGM takes place at the Taber Heritage Inn. Registration starts at noon with the meeting getting underway at 1 p.m.
The cost to attend is $100.