Court of Queen’s Bench upholds and extends order preventing removal of equipment from Lexin sites
The Court of Queen’s Bench has upheld and extended a previous interim court order preventing any person from removing equipment from Lexin Resource Ltd. sites licenced by the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) without AER approval or court order.
The AER submitted evidence to the court that equipment has been removed from Lexin’s AER-licenced sites without prior AER approval. The order applies to all persons, as any unauthorized removal of equipment can present a risk to public safety and the environment. The AER has served copies of the order on Lexin, its working interest participants, and many others, and posted the order to the AER website to ensure broad awareness of the order.
Lexin remains the responsible licensee and is required by law to fulfill all of its statutory responsibilities as an AER licensee, including emergency and incident response. Lexin has a history of noncompliances with AER requirements and has admitted it is unable to fulfill all its duties as licensee. For that reason, the AER has designated certain Lexin sites as orphans for the purposes of facilitating safe suspension and will be looking to companies with working interests in Lexin’s AER-licensed sites to do the same. In all cases, parties are available to provide incident and emergency response.
The AER has hired security for a number of sites to watch for vandalism, theft, and any potential operational issues and report concerns to the AER’s 24-hour emergency and complaint response line.
Copies of the orders can be found on the AER’s Compliance Dashboard.