Every year in B.C., oil and gas companies conduct more than 100,000 activities at industrial sites across the province, which include natural gas and oil wells, pipelines, processing plants and more. Most of this activity takes place in the northeast — and it’s ramping up to support the province’s new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export sector.

Keeping watch is the BC Energy Regulator, which is responsible for ensuring compliance of more than “1,000 individual regulatory requirements,” according to documents obtained through freedom of information legislation. Those requirements include monitoring everything from the condition of industrial equipment to allowable water use for fracking to emissions levels to ensuring “ecologically suitable species” are used to restore sites after they are no longer active.

The regulator is absorbing an increase in responsibility as the northeast starts to feel the impacts of an uptick in drilling and production to feed LNG Canada, the Coastal GasLink pipeline and potential additional LNG export projects. It is also being given additional powers over other energy projects, like transmission lines, wind and solar. 

BC Energy Regulator officials conduct more than 4,000 in-person inspections every year, accessing remote oil and gas sites in trucks, helicopters and all-terrain vehicles. When inspectors find evidence of pollution or public safety issues, they follow policy guidelines on how and when to escalate their findings for enforcement. However, inspectors “do not have the knowledge and skill set to manage for long-term contamination,” according to the documents obtained by The Narwhal.

Instead, when government officials find a problem, they note the issue in inspection notes and refer the issue to an unspecified “environmental stewardship group” because resolving long-term contamination can “often take years,” the documents said.

The regulator declined to explain to The Narwhal what the environmental stewardship group is, nor did it provide information about how the group manages long-term contamination.

The BC Energy Regulator is a Crown corporation that answers to the Ministry of Energy and Climate Solutions, headed by Adrian Dix. Through a suite of agreements with various B.C. ministries, the regulator has long had special powers to make decisions related to ecosystem health, wildlife, cultural heritage sites, climate, Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities and more.

Regulator officials can issue tickets, fines and warnings and order companies that are breaking the law to stop working. The agency is also responsible for issuing permits for energy projects — everything from pumping water from a stream and laying a pipeline under a river to setting allowable levels of greenhouse gas emissions at natural gas wells.

BC Energy Regulator ‘actively scaling’ compliance and enforcement

The documents were in response to an investigation by The Narwhal and the Investigative Journalism Foundation published earlier this year. They appear to be part of an internal review of the energy regulator’s compliance and enforcement regime.

Government communications noted “plans are in place for the [BC Energy Regulator] to begin posting full inspection records on its website, by the end of 2025” and that it is improving the way it manages its compliance and enforcement department, including implementing “new training materials and standardization for inspection note taking.”

When asked whether the regulator is planning to increase its capacity to conduct inspections by hiring more compliance and enforcement staff or using tools, such as remote monitoring equipment, the regulator said it is “actively scaling its compliance and enforcement capacity” without specifying how it will do so. 

“This expansion is not just a response to increased workload, it is a deliberate move to reinforce the [BC Energy Regulator’s] commitment to robust, land-based oversight and to ensure regulatory coverage remains strong and effective across the province,” the spokesperson said.

The regulator currently employs 17 compliance and enforcement officers and three technical advisors to conduct field-based inspections. Those employees report to seven senior staffers, who also have “a role in conducting field compliance, from inspections to investigations,” according to a previous response from the regulator.

According to publicly available information, B.C. is currently home to more than 6,500 active facilities — but that does not appear to include pipelines, which span thousands of kilometres. The BC Energy Regulator database also appears to be outdated, listing the LNG Canada facility as “under construction” despite its start of operations earlier this year. 

The regulator plans to conduct 2,800 “data and risk-informed” inspections in the next year, according to its annual compliance plan, as well as an unknown number of “officer-selected inspections … to ensure flexibility and professional judgment in the field.”

“The [BC Energy Regulator] is confident in its inspection rate, methodology, staff expertise and tools which collectively uphold its mandate to protect British Columbians and the environment from impacts of energy resource activities,” the regulator told The Narwhal.

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