Today, we published revised editions of Directive 088: Licensee Life-Cycle Management and Manual 023: Licensee Life-Cycle Management. The changes described below were previously announced in Bulletin 2025-27 (2026 industry-wide closure spend requirements) and Bulletin 2025-35 (adjustments to the mandatory closure spend for licence transfers).
The following changes were made to Directive 088:
- Enabled licensees who exceed their mandatory closure spend by 20% to “bank” this exceedance between 2025 and 2027. Closure spending reported after the March 31 reporting deadline will not be applied to a licensee’s banked spend.
- The transferor and transferee licensee’s mandatory closure spend will be adjusted upon approval of the licence transfer for applications submitted on or after January 1, 2026.
- Modified the closure spend compliance approach to include a rolling three-year compliance period for licensees with an average mandatory closure spend of $200 000 or less over the previous three years.
The following changes were made to Manual 023:
- Added details on the implementation of the mandatory spend changes for banking spend, mandatory spend adjustments for transferred licences, and the rolling three-year period for closure spend compliance.
- Revised the licensee capability assessment:
- New parameter weightings for non-producer groups (midstream, waste management, and pipeline). Tables 3, 4, 5, and 6 were revised.
- Added information on licensee business status to provide insight into how a licensee moves through the business stages.
The changes to Directive 088 described in this bulletin do not include revisions stemming from public feedback on closure nomination (Bulletin 2025-32). Closure nomination changes will be incorporated into a future edition of Directive 088 to be released in 2026.
The revised edition of the directive is available on the Directive 088 landing page, and Manual 023 is available on the manuals page. If you have any questions, contact our Customer Contact Centre by phone at 1-855-297-8311 or by email at inquiries@aer.ca.
