Market Intel is Live: Alberta's Environmental Consultants and Operators, Counted
By Phaseview | Published July 18, 2026
Alberta generates hundreds of thousands of environmental reports, and until now almost none of it was legible in aggregate. Today that changes. Market Intel is four pages that answer the questions the raw filings never could on their own: who does the most environmental work in Alberta, who is genuinely growing, which operators are actually closing out their wells and which are falling behind, and - if you have a site right now - who has already done this exact work nearby.
It is all built from public filings with the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER). We didn't survey anyone or buy a list. We read the reports - hundreds of thousands of them - and counted. And it's free to browse.
Here's what launched, and how to read it.
What's in Market Intel
Market Intel is four connected pages, reachable from the Market Intel menu in the header.
Industry Insights
The big picture, and the number that frames everything else on the site: Alberta's province-wide reclamation rate is only about 21% - of every well ever licensed, barely a fifth has been fully reclaimed and signed off with a certificate. Roughly 99,000 wells currently sit abandoned (sealed, but still awaiting surface reclamation), a backlog that grows by about 2,300 wells every year - on the order of $64 million a year in new reclamation liability, at the Orphan Well Association's roughly $27,700 per-well average. And that is before the ~70,000 suspended (idle) wells that have not even been decommissioned yet, each of which will eventually need both. The page breaks the inventory down by status and by operator, and shows that backlog widening year over year.
Consultant Deep Dives
A profile for every environmental consulting firm in our registry - nearly 300 of them. For each firm you get report volume, the mix of work (Phase I, Phase II, remediation, reclamation certificates), how that volume has moved over time, where they work, and which operators they work for. There's a growth view that plots every firm by size and momentum, so you can see who's expanding and who's holding steady.
Operator Deep Dives
The same treatment for the companies that own the wells - more than 900 operators. Report volume, closure and reclamation activity, and the consulting firms each operator engages. This is the page for understanding who is driving environmental work, and who they're hiring to do it.
Find a Consultant
The one built for a live decision. Enter a legal land description or drop a pin, pick a service line (assessment, remediation, reclamation and closure), and get a shortlist of firms that have actually filed reports for that kind of work near that site - ranked on local track record, with their nearby reports shown on a map. It's the difference between "here are some environmental consultants" and "here are the firms who have done this work half a township from your site."
Try it right here:
How a track record is built
Because these pages make claims about real companies, we want to be precise about what the numbers mean and - just as important - what they don't.
Everything starts from a filed report. When an environmental assessment, remediation report, or reclamation certificate is filed with the AER, it names the consultant who did the work, the operator the work was for, and the location. We extract those three facts from every report and aggregate them. A firm's "volume" is simply how many reports name it. Nothing is modelled, estimated, or purchased.
Volume is activity, not revenue - and not quality. A firm that files a lot of reports is doing a lot of reportable work. That is not the same as billing the most, employing the most people, or doing the best work. We can count filings; we can't see invoices or outcomes. Read volume as an activity signal and nothing more.
Not all reports are equal. A Reclamation Certificate is a light document; a Phase II Environmental Site Assessment can be hundreds of pages backed by drilling, sampling, and lab chemistry. A firm that files a thousand reclamation certificates and a firm that files a thousand Phase II assessments are not doing comparable work, even though the raw count is identical. That's exactly why every deep-dive page has a classification filter - so you can compare like for like (Phase II against Phase II) instead of letting light, high-volume report types dominate. When you read a ranking, set the classification first.
Growth is measured against the market, not in a vacuum. On the growth views, a firm's growth is the change in its report count over the selected window, normalized against how the whole market moved. Alberta's consulting market grew about 9% over 2023-2025; a firm that also grew 9% didn't gain any ground. So we show relative growth - who is genuinely taking share versus who is just riding overall demand. A minimum-report floor keeps a firm that went from 2 reports to 6 from showing up as a 200% rocket.
Names are normalized, and normalization is imperfect. "CNRL," "Canadian Natural Resources Ltd.," and "Canadian Natural Resources Limited" are one company, and we spend a lot of effort collapsing those variants so a firm's history isn't scattered across a dozen spellings. It's careful work, but it isn't flawless. If a profile looks off, it usually traces back to a naming edge case, and we'd genuinely like to hear about it.
Rebrands and acquisitions aren't organic growth. When a firm is renamed or acquired, its filed work re-attributes to the new name, which can make a firm look like it exploded overnight when it simply changed banners. We flag those cases rather than crown them, and our consultant lineage view links predecessor and successor firms so an acquired book of work reads as continuity instead of a fake breakout. A single-year jump off a near-zero base is a signal to look closer, not a growth trophy.
Why we built it
Alberta generates an enormous amount of environmental information, and almost none of it is easy to see in aggregate. An operator planning next year's closure program, a consultant sizing up a market, a landowner trying to understand who works in their area - all of them are usually working from anecdote, a personal network, or a PDF someone emailed around. The underlying filings are public, but "public" and "usable" are very different things.
Market Intel is our attempt to close that gap: to take data that already belongs to everyone and make it legible. The pages are free to browse. A free account unlocks the full rankings and the site-specific consultant finder.
We'll be writing more over the next few weeks - a look at which consulting firms are actually gaining ground, the operator side of the same story, and a practical guide to choosing a consultant for a specific site. For now, the pages are live:
Go break them. And if you find a number that looks wrong, tell us - on data this size, the corrections are how it gets better.