92% of Albertans agree: Oil companies should pay for cleanup. So why is MAS doing the opposite?
Originally published by The Energy Mix
Published November 2025
Read the full article at The Energy Mix
92% of Albertans want oil companies to pay for well cleanup.
87% want companies to pay unpaid municipal taxes.
84% want companies to pay unpaid landowner rent.
Veteran pollster Janet Brown: “We very rarely see research with numbers this high. Albertans have a pretty strong consensus.”
Yet the Mature Asset Strategy does the opposite—shifting cleanup costs to taxpayers through ClosureCo and HarvestCo.
The reality right now:
Taxpayers have covered $150 million in unpaid surface lease payments since 2010. In 2024 alone: $30 million. Amount recovered from delinquent companies? Less than 0.5%.
Rural municipalities are owed $253.9 million in unpaid oil company taxes.
The government’s response? Claims the poll “aligns with the path we are taking through our Mature Asset Strategy.”
Pembina Institute’s Amanda Bryant calls MAS’s fatal flaw a “refusal to inconvenience the fossil fuel industry”—noting that renewable energy projects must put up 30-60% security for cleanup, while oil companies get taxpayer bailouts.
Read the full polling breakdown and expert analysis at The Energy Mix.
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