Danielle Smith has a big idea to clean up oil and gas wells. It's all kinds of messy

This column is an opinion from Andrew Leach, an energy and environmental economist, and professor at the University of Albrta. For more information about CBC’s Opinion section, please see the FAQ.

In a July 2021 op-ed in the Calgary Herald, Danielle Smith, then a business lobbyist with the Alberta Enterprise Group, advocated for a program called R-Star. It would provide royalty credits to oil and gas companies completing cleanup activities already required of them.

While it appeared for a long time to be dead, R-Star has new life.

Smith is now Alberta premier, and continues to champion the idea. Peter Guthrie, her new energy minister, promised to