Grant: Alliance Grants

Globally, Canada is the 4th largest producer of oil and gas combined with oil and gas representing 5.6% of Canada's GDP. British Columbia is the 2nd largest producer of those energies in Canada after Alberta. The BC oil and gas commission (BCOGC) purpose is to regulate oil and gas activities to provide for a sound development. It reviews applications for permits to ensure they are in the public best interest by considering the impact on the economy, the environment, Indigenous Nations, forestry, and archaeology. The present project focuses on predicting when oil and gas wells will become inactive (due to decreased production, depleted reserves, depressed pricing, interruptions to transportation systems, or excess production of water) to plan the restoration of the site. Being able to project the rate of restoration over a longer term will both improve risk forecasting and the ability of the Commission to estimate the future cumulative effects of oil and gas activity. Legislation enforces timelines to shutdown dormant sites, and BCOGC dormancy and shutdown regulation aims at restoring 10,000 to 11,000 dormant sites by 2036. Moreover, when a site owners is no longer available, e.g. due to bankruptcy, site restoration costs falls on the province (over the past 5 years, around 700 sites were designated as orphan in BC). At this time, BCOGC can project when site restoration will be required for all dormant sites up to 2023, but cannot predict when currently active sites will become dormant. Leveraging BCOGC decades of data with UBC expertise in machine learning and optimization, the project aims to create new predictive models that are explainable, interpretable, and fair while maintaining an acceptable degree of accuracy. A critical objective is for all stakeholders (BCOGC managers, Indigenous communities, oil and gas operators) to understand the model predictions and its limitations. The short term goal is to better manage the province environmental debt by predicting wells life cycles when a permit application is submitted. The longer term goal is to reduce the province financial risk by predicting the number of orphaned wells. Such predictions will allow BCOGC to better manage the province financial debt associated with orphan wells.