{"id":61872,"date":"2022-02-13T07:50:17","date_gmt":"2022-02-13T12:50:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=61872"},"modified":"2022-02-13T07:50:17","modified_gmt":"2022-02-13T12:50:17","slug":"a-case-study-of-fossil-fuel-depletion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=61872","title":{"rendered":"A Case Study of Fossil-Fuel Depletion"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Case Study of Fossil-Fuel Depletion<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

A few months ago I received an intriguing email from researcher and activist\u00a0Regan Boychuk<\/a>. For the past 15 years, Boychuk has been studying the oil-and-gas industry in Alberta (Canada) and he wanted to know if I would join his project. I immediately said yes.<\/p>\n

Some backstory. You can think of Alberta as the Texas of Canada. Alberta is endowed with a vast trove of oil that it has been exploiting for the past 75 years. And like Texas, Alberta\u2019s politics are\u00a0dominated by the oil industry<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Oh, and Alberta is where I grew up.<\/p>\n

Back to Regan Boychuk\u2019s work. Boychuk has a vision for an Alberta in which the oil industry goes extinct by being forced to clean up its own mess. As it stands, Alberta has about 300,000 oil-and-gas wells\u00a0waiting to be cleaned up<\/a>\u00a0at the oil companies\u2019 expense. The problem is that oil companies are not forced to save for the clean-up expense, and accounting tricks allow them to make the clean-up liability look negligible in their corporate accounts.1<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0It\u2019s an open secret (implicitly endorsed<\/a>\u00a0by the Alberta government) that defunct wells will never be cleaned up. If they were, the oil industry would go bankrupt.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s exactly what Boychuk wants. His dream is to kill 3 birds with one stone:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Show that the oil-and-gas industry is insolvent;<\/li>\n
  2. Clean up every well in Alberta;<\/li>\n
  3. Fund full employment and a transition to a sustainable Alberta economy.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    To hasten this big-picture goal, Boychuk asked me to help by estimating production curves for every oil-and-gas well in Alberta. After much head scratching and many lines of code, that\u2019s what I\u2019ve done.<\/p>\n

    \u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    A Case Study of Fossil-Fuel Depletion A few months ago I received an intriguing email from researcher and activist\u00a0Regan Boychuk. For the past 15 years, Boychuk has been studying the oil-and-gas industry in Alberta (Canada) and he wanted to know if I would join his project. I immediately said yes. Some backstory. You can think […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1082,29938,103,32646,9829,328,1777,5455,1729,32647],"class_list":["post-61872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-alberta","tag-blair-fix","tag-canada","tag-economic-from-the-top-down","tag-fossil-fuel-depletion","tag-fossil-fuels","tag-hubbert-curve","tag-marion-king-hubbert","tag-oil-and-gas-industry","tag-regan-boychuk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61872"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61873,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61872\/revisions\/61873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}