Holistic Assessment
The holistic assessment includes multiple factors that provide insight into a company's ability to manage their regulatory and liability obligations, including cleaning up their sites. This assessment has two primary components: “unreasonable risk” factors found in section 4.5 of Directive 067: Eligibility Requirements for Acquiring and Holding Energy Licences and Approvals and factors used in the licensee capability assessment found in section 2.1 of Directive 088: Licensee Life-Cycle Management.
The holistic assessment is used for decisions as outlined Directive 067, Directive 068, and Directive 088 (such as licence transfers and security collection for licence transfers).
Licensee Capability Assessment
The licensee capability assessment (LCA) is the backbone of our holistic assessment of companies throughout the energy development life cycle in the oil and gas sector. Introduced through Directive 088, the LCA considers a variety of factors to help us evaluate a company, including their financial and liability risk, their performance compared with similar companies, and other operations, closure, and administrative factors, with compliance history being considered throughout.
The information that feeds into the LCA comes from several sources, including financial information that companies are required to provide us through Directive 067. Each company can view their LCA information in OneStop.
Financial and reserves information collected by the AER must be kept confidential for five and fifteen years, respectively, as outlined in section 12.152(2) of the Oil and Gas Conservation Rules. The information submitted by a licensee to the AER will remain confidential; however, some of the findings or results generated from AER assessments using the financial and reserve information will be made available through liability management reporting and compliance and enforcement responses. More information can be found in section 6 of Directive 088.
A comprehensive overview of the LCA and all the factors we consider can be found in Manual 023: Licensee Life-Cycle Management.
