The Alberta government has announced that it will launch a
single regulator for oil and gas development within the Province in
an effort to improve its competitiveness.
In a statement released today, Energy Minister Ron Liepert said the
provincial government has accepted a report created by the
Regulatory Enhancement Task Force (Task Force). The recommendations
outlined in the report include:
- Establishing a new Policy Management Office and ensuring integration of natural resource polices;
- Creating a single oil and gas regulatory body;
- Providing clear public engagement processes;
- Using a common approach to risk assessment and management;
- Adopting performance measures to enable continuous system improvement; and
- Creating a mechanism to help resolve disputes between landowners and companies, and enforce agreements where required
Liepert stated that the recommendations will be immediately
taken through the appropriate government review process for
implementation and that legislation will be introduced this spring
to being implementation of the report. Practically, functions that
were previously the responsibility of separate ministries, such as
Alberta Environment and Alberta Sustainable Resource Development,
will now be co-ordinated by the Energy Resource Conservation
Board.
The Task Force was created in March 2010 after a review found that
the oil and gas regulatory system in Alberta had become
increasingly complex and characterized by a lack of integrated
policies. The goal of the task force was to perform an upstream oil
and gas regulatory review and recommend system level reforms to
ensure the Province has an efficient and competitive regulatory
system which also maintains Alberta's commitment to
environmental management, public safety and resource
conservation.
A complete copy of the report is available here.
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