@molszyns.bsky.social:
I’ve been on this file since about 2018. Never read something quite like this before. Give it your time, #Ableg. #cdnpoli too. And props to @drewanderson.bsky.social
‘Broken’ trust: senior political staffers met by jeers at meeting with rural Albertans, Alberta’s oil and gas well problem is a ‘giant stinking pile of shit,’ according to the premier’s special advisor, who wrote the province’s strategy to address the issue and is on the Alberta Energy Regulator board by Drew Anderson, Photography by Isabella Falsetti, Sept. 15, 2025, The Narwhal
Albertans are angry with the provincial government’s proposed strategy to deal with problems caused by the oil and gas sector. They made their voices heard at a recent community meeting in Warburg, Alta. Here, Dwight Popowich expresses frustration with Vitor Marciano, the chief of staff to Alberta’s energy minister.
If Vitor Marciano, the chief of staff to Alberta’s energy minister, thought he was going to get a warm reception at a recent meeting in the village of Warburg, he was mistaken.
Marciano faced jeers and doubt as he tried to sell a largely rural crowd on the government’s latest plan to deal with a cascade of problems caused by the oil and gas sector.
Around 100 people were in the Warburg Community Hall on Sept. 9 to hear Marciano talk about the Mature Asset Strategy. It’s a series of recommendations the government says will help with the oil and gas industry’s unpaid taxes and leases, which include tens of thousands of inactive wells and environmental liabilities of almost $38 billion, according to the Alberta Energy Regulator.
He was joined, unexpectedly, by the author of that strategy, Dave Yager, a board member of the regulator and a special advisor to Premier Danielle Smith. Yager was not advertised as a guest.
“The mature asset strategy will not give companies taxpayer dollars to clean up their assets,” Marciano said, summarizing his message to the crowd.
“It will,” came a voice from the back of the room.
“The mature asset strategy will not end or diminish the Orphan Well Association,” Marciano said, referring to the industry-funded association meant to deal with wells left behind by bankrupt companies.
“It will,” came the same voice.
“The mature asset strategy does not violate the polluter-pay principle,” Marciano continued.
“It will,” came the reply.
That disagreement set the stage for the night, though it was one of the quieter exchanges, with the crowd often interrupting and arguing with Marciano. The level of frustration was high, with what many see as regulatory failure and government complicity — a view that Marciano himself largely agreed with, but which he promised would change.
Many in the crowd remained unconvinced, and Marciano’s own presentation didn’t help.
Twice in the early stages of his talk, Marciano was interrupted by audience members representing organizations that were mentioned in Marciano’s slides. They did not agree with his characterizations of facts.
Surface rights groups were involved from the first meeting to discuss a path forward, according to Marciano. Not true, according to William Heidecker, a rancher and the president of the Alberta Surface Rights Federation, who said a request to be included was rebuffed. The Rural Municipalities of Alberta are working on solutions within the new strategy to tackle unpaid taxes, according to Marciano. Not true, according to Wyatt Skovron, the general manager of policy and advocacy for the association, who made clear the organization wants nothing to do with the new plan.
Jennifer Stephenson, a local landowner, sparred with Marciano over not receiving a company’s lease payments on her land. Marciano said she needs to apply for reimbursement from the government.
“It’s still our tax dollars,” she said. “That’s not good enough.”
In the room, there was palpable anger with the government and with the regulator for not enforcing existing rules. Grievances included wells being transferred to financially unstable companies, inspections that don’t happen, wells that aren’t closed and cleaned, payments that aren’t made, as well as the complaint that licences aren’t pulled and bad actors removed.
Many in the room are also fighting to get land lease payments — the money owed to farmers and landowners by companies with wells on their land.
Marciano and Yager’s message was: yes, mistakes were made. Now, please trust that we’re going to fix them.
Proposed strategy to deal with oil and gas wells would see government take over old wells itself
It wasn’t just locals at the meeting, a sign of the scale of Alberta’s problems and the controversy of the government’s plans.
Rakhi Pancholi, deputy leader of the Alberta NDP was there, as was Paul McLauchlin, the former president of the Rural Municipalities of Alberta. There was Susanne Calabrese, a lawyer for Ecojustice who is pushing for an ethics investigation against Yager, along with her client Dwight Popowich, and more.
Municipalities are owed $254 million in outstanding property taxes from oil and gas companies, while another $200 million has been written off in the past decade, never to be collected. According to the Rural Municipalities of Alberta, more than $100 million of the outstanding taxes are owed by 201 companies that are still operating.
There are nearly 80,000 inactive wells scattered across the province, some of which haven’t produced any oil or gas for decades, often leaching pollution in the ground and the air.
Landowners with failing companies on their properties have to wait months for the government to reimburse unpaid leases. The government paid more than $150 million to cover lease obligations for private companies between 2010 and 2024 and in that time has recovered less than one per cent from those companies.
The mature asset strategy — developed to respond to many of these issues — has been controversial since it was first leaked to the media in March. Particularly controversial has been the possibility of creating a government entity that would take ownership of aging wells owned by derelict companies, dubbed “HarvestCo.” That and other proposals in the strategy could be government policy this fall.
Those wells would either be transferred to the Orphan Well Association, sold to different private operators to run or be taken over by HarvestCo to wring whatever wealth is left in the ground, with the goal of funding their cleanup.
Critics say it shifts all the risk onto taxpayers, while Marciano argues it would be an effective way for the government to reap financial rewards from old wells and help pay for cleanup. He said it would also help shut down bad operators, even if the process would seem to copy the business practices of companies that buy up cheap wells to reap profit and then disappear.
In effect, Marciano said, this would be a government-sanctioned organization mimicking what he called “industry stripper companies,” referring to companies that buy wells cheaply and pull as much profit from them while shirking responsibilities including taxes, leases and cleanup. Too often, Marciano added, the companies function as “pump and dumps.”
The government, Marciano believes, could do it better.
‘Gigantic problem’: top political staffer acknowledges issues in Alberta oil and gas sector
Marciano repeatedly said past governments have ignored what he called a “gigantic problem” in Alberta’s oil and gas sector. He said there are good companies, but there are also bad ones inching along and not paying their dues.
Listening to stakeholders while crafting the report, he said, showed the government that “trust was broken and the trust had to be repaired.”
But Marciano also repeatedly warned the problems are going to get worse before they get better.
“Folks, companies are going to go down, and more companies are going to go down over the next few years than have gone down in the past,” he said.
The regulator is going to be more aggressive at shutting down failing companies and preventing them from buying up wells in the first place, he said.
The government strategy could include a sort of security deposit to clean up wells, but that might not actually involve cash and could include the government as a sort of insurance backstop. Details are still unclear.
“We owe it to it to rural Alberta, to the jobs, to the taxpayers, to the economic opportunity, to make sure that the cleanup of these assets is done as efficiently, as intelligently as possible, while recognizing that there are companies that need to be put out of business, and they’re going to get put out of business,” Marciano said.
Yager was more straightforward about the problem.
“I think I can say this in this town — I now refer to it as the giant stinking pile of shit. This is a mess. It always has been a mess,” he said of the issues facing Alberta.
Yager, who was hired to review the regulator and find solutions to its shortcomings, said when he arrived in 2023, the liability department, which tries to prevent bad companies from taking over wells, was not effective. It was using old data to try and predict if companies were failing. He said he was “mortified.”
Renato Gandia, a spokesperson for the Alberta Energy Regulator, did not respond to questions asking for reaction to Yager’s comments, or whether the liability department has changed the way it operates.
“Any changes to the Alberta Energy Regulator would need to be led by the Government of Alberta,” 
WTF? AER is supposed to be independent of the fucking corrupt gov’t! he said by email. “We encourage you to reach out to them directly.”
The regulator, an arm’s-length agencyindustry’s evil law-violating self regulatorwhich Yager’s own review said should be more independent of government, did not reply to a follow-up email, but instead forwarded the request to the government — specifically, to the office of Energy Minister Brian Jean.They are all, including Herr Yager, corrupt, sleazy, self serving, dishonest, pollution and harm enabling circle jerkers. None are trustworthy.
“Minister Jean has long acknowledged that the issues around some oil and gas companies not paying their municipal taxes or surface leases have not been dealt with to the satisfaction of all stakeholders by previous governments,” wrote a spokesperson, in response to the forwarded request.
“We have confidence that the mature asset strategy process and other reforms undertaken by the Alberta Energy Regulator will begin to deal with these issues and result in the Alberta Energy Regulator being able to improve its ability to assess licencees and to act more effectively on those that are not regulatorily compliant.”
Marciano didn’t respond to a follow-up call by publication time.
Yager said he wants to ensure indicators, such as companies not paying contractors or surface leases, are considered.Totally meaningless, and Fuck Face Yager knows it. AER considers all kinds of shit, ignores everything and anything of concern, to grant approvals, and help companies break the law. Excellent example is Encana/Ovintiv. I bet a billion dollars, UCP, Yager and his KKKlan in UCP, AER, Environment will never order the company to repair its illegal frac’s to Rosebud’s drinking water aquifers, and never order my water permanently appropriately fixed. They are liars, douche fuckers, corrupt evil science-hating, truth-hating, life, water, air and humanity hating shits.
“There’s going to be material changes coming out of regulatory enforcement on all of these files, because now they are capable of doing something,” he said.Bla Bla fucking bla, I do not believe you you fucking liar. AER was fully capable of “doing something” like enforcing the regulations and law for decades, but nearly always CHOOSES not to, or, was/is ordered not to by gov’t after gov’t’ after gov’t and or billionaires, many of them American.
What that “something” is still needs to be ironed out. Yager said it’s a work in progress.
Regulators should ‘do their damn job’: landowner
While Yager and Marciano promised better enforcement and action on the issues plaguing Alberta, and rural Alberta in particular, many in the crowd were frustrated with being asked to wait.
Many wondered why the government needs to completely overhaul the system instead of simply enforcing the regulations already in place.It’s just another con job serving rich polluters, to lie and delay until there is no more oil, gas, bitumen left and everything is fucking contaminated.
Heidecker, with the surface rights federation, said the regulator already has the ability to pull licences when companies don’t pay their leases, noting there are rules in place to crack down on bad actors and those rules aren’t being enforced.
“What we need is regulators to do their damn job,” he said. “Let’s get some things done.”Ain’t never going to happen. This is idiotic Repuglican Alberta, where blaming everything on the Trudeaus is the name of the rural con game.
@tomsin.bsky.social:
This is the legacy of the O&G industry in AB
The industrial capitalist’s standard playbook:
buy off enough locals with shiny jobs that they let you rob them blind and leave their kids and grandkids with the mess to clean up
FAFO Alberta
@ddrae.bsky.social:
Yup right before their very eyes. Same breed as the republicans/magas. Vote against your
@ipaige.bsky.social:
I wonder how many of these rural Albertans will still vote for the UCP. Will the NDP fix this if they’re elected?When the NDP were in power last time, they made the problem worse, and gave big money gifts to frac’ers from taxpayers. Politicians are corrupt cowards in Alberta The cult of oil and gas is strong in Alberta.
@ddrae.bsky.social:
They vote against their interests like maga to own the libs.
@qu1nton.bsky.social:
They will vote further right given the chance. Now, recall that Yager was once Wildrose Party president. (With Jean and Smith, mind you)
@martithrall.bsky.social:
And yet, the majority of those people voted UCP and would vote UCP again tomorrow.
@ask70.bsky.social:
Can’t wait to see how they blame Trudeau for this.
@bettegray.bsky.social:
“The government could do it better” This government? With their track record?
@dariussnieckus.bsky.social:
So more like AB’s ‘Manure Asset Strategy’?
@qu1nton.bsky.social:
That photo of Bill Heidekker says it all.
@llyrkellow.bsky.social:
The Alberta CONservatives, including Reform, UCP and Pr. Smith have been owned by the O&G for decades. Nothing is going to change under the UCP. Smoke, mirrrors, and BS.
Refer also to:
…
AER is industry’s self regulator – a lying untrustworthy corrupt triple douche fucker of Albertans, our water, air, land, communities and families, and enabler of oil and gas industry crimes. Dildo Danielle Smith put her good pal Dave Yager on the board, so it’s more dirty than usual.
In 2001 and 2004, Encana illegally repeatedly frac’d into Rosebud’s drinking water aquifers. The company broke every law and regulation in place to protect Alberta water; AER and Alberta Environment engaged in fraud to help the company cover it up and get away with it, and bullied, lied and abused us frac harmed Albertans, to the manic degree of AER violating my charter rights trying to terrify me silent, banishing me from energy regulation if I didn’t stop talking to friends, family and the public about its crimes and Encana’s, judging me a criminal without any evidence or even letting me know I was being judged and a few years later in a court filing writing that I had no charter rights to protect because I am a terrorist, again without any evidence. “Strictly adhering to all regulations – as set out by the AER” means dick all.
… Thanks to Encana’s frac’ing and AER’s criminality, I’ve been forced to rely on hauled alternate water for 20 years. I am tired, near the end of my life, and disgusted and fed up with Albertans, notably rural cause most are cowards and more interested in money than safe communities and drinking water, AER, gov’t, our lazy dishonest frac harm enabling media, and lying abusive harmful water-destroying frac’rs. Hauling water gets harder and harder for me every month …
2025: Persist Oil and Gas Inc. – “Shitbag” Massimo Geremia
https://www.gangsterismout.com/2025/03/persist-oil-and-gas-inc-shitbag-mass.html
2025 Persist Oil and Gas Inc. – Massimo “Shitbag” Geremia
Calgary oil and gas company Persist Oil and Gas Inc. has been ordered to remove all its equipment from a piece of land it leased in Rocky View County after it was found to be operating an illegal Bitcoin mining operation at the site. Geremia admitted he didn’t obtain permits for Bitcoin mining from the Alberta Utilities Commission, Land and Property Rights Tribunal or Rocky View County.
The Alberta Court of King’s Bench said March 10 that Massimo ‘Mass’ Geremia breached the terms of a lease with property owner Roy Flowers. Persist installed multiple one-megawatt gas generators, computers and other equipment designed for mining Bitcoin in April 2021. Natural gas was used to power the compressor when gas prices were low enough for it to be more profitable to mine Bitcoin. The original 10-year lease expired in 2019 and Persist didn’t have a new one.
When oil and gas company Manitok Energy went out of business in 2018, it sent tens of millions worth of environmental liabilities to the Orphan Well Association, the non-profit responsible for cleaning up the messes left behind by bankrupt oil and gas companies.
Less than a year later, new company Persist Oil and Gas Inc, with the same CEO Massimo 'Mass' Geremia, acquired all of Manitok's remaining non-orphan well assets ... while dumping the liabilities on taxpayers. Albertan farmers see shitholes like Mass Geremia come in, run up huge bills, and then evaporate. The public get left with the bill, and the farmer gets stuck with the deteriorating wells. It costs around $229,000 on average to plug and reclaim wells, with related pipelines and facilities doubling that cost.Using $200k, and ignoring infrastructure, the 181 orphan wells pure shitbag Massimo ‘Mass’ Geremia ran away from will cost in the realm of $72 million.
2025: Alberta Bitcoin Scheisters; Persist Oil and Gas Inc. breached terms of lease with Roy Flowers
… Persist’s position as an emerging player in the southern Alberta Mannville formation (with “stacked” multiple pay zones) oil development …
Persist’s large acreage position of over 160,000 net acres provides it with significant growth potential with the application of constantly improving horizontal drilling and multi-stage fracture stimulation techniques. …
