In a letter dated Thursday, the Alberta Energy Regulator says it has decided the Grassy Mountain proposal should be considered an advanced project and be exempt from a ministerial order banning coal development along the province's eastern slopes.

The proposed changes, released Friday, would change several provisions that industry and provincial governments objected to in the original version.

In his ruling, Judge Richard Southcott said the joint federal-provincial review panel that examined the Grassy Mountain proposal near Crowsnest Pass didn't live up to the consultation promises it made.

New information about high level of pollution were published in a the journal Environmental Pollution by provincial government scientists who were not made available to speak to reporters,

There are currently 51 water shortage advisories in the province. River basins from north to south face critical water shortages from low precipitation.

An interprovincial wine war is fermenting after Alberta's liquor wholesaler told vintners in British Columbia that it won't stock their products in retail stores unless they stop shipping it directly to consumers.

Authors of a report published in the journal Science, say the massive releases of volatile organic compounds, separate from the industry's climate-change-causing emissions, raise concerns about what those hundreds of complex, highly reactive chemicals are doing in the environment. 

Critics are calling for a public inquiry into the actions of the Alberta Energy Regulator after documents surfaced suggesting the agency downplayed the industry's environmental liabilities and withheld information on those costs.

In total, the documents suggest the liability estimates that inform a report released by the regulator this week were low by 263 per cent.

Alberta's oil and gas producers spent nearly $700 million in 2022 on cleaning up the hundreds of thousands of old wells that dot the province, the regulator's first report on the extent of those liabilities indicates.