Just hours after signing an agreement in principle with Ottawa that already trades away the equivalent of 53 million tonnes of climate pollution, the Alberta government has released new methane control regulations that undercut the new plan, an analyst says.

On Wednesday, the federal and provincial governments unveiled first details of an equivalency agreement that will allow Alberta to set its own regulations on climate-busting methane emissions as long as it cuts those emissions 75% by 2035. The agreement in principle cemented a five-year postponement of Ottawa’s 2030 methane target that first appeared in the November, 2025 memorandum of understanding (MOU) between Canada and Alberta.

But just two days later, the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) is out with a series of amendments to its directive on upstream petroleum industry flaring, incinerating, and venting, Directive 060. The Calgary-based Pembina Institute says the technical language in the document appears to set a less ambitious target than the federal-provincial agreement.

“While Alberta has a right to design its own regulation, it must result in equal emissions reductions as the federal rules. Yet Alberta’s draft regulation is clearly weaker than the federal one in several key respects,” Amanda Bryant, head of Pembina’s oil and gas program, said in a release.

“We would not expect this draft regulation to be deemed legally equivalent under the forthcoming equivalency process.”

The new AER rule echoed Alberta’s announcement last fall that it would weaken the industrial carbon pricing system that was a cornerstone of the Canada-Alberta MOU, just days after the intensely controversial deal was announced.

“I think this is a fair comparison,” Bryant told The Energy Mix in an email Friday afternoon. “An agreement to cooperate, followed by immediate action that obviously contradicts the letter and the spirit of the agreements.”

While federal regulations prohibit any routine venting of methane, the Pembina release states, the AER rule only limits venting volumes, and only from one specific source, with no indication of any other steps the province will take to hit the 75% reduction threshold. In her email, Bryant said other discrepancies include:

• Any measure to phase out existing emitting pneumatic devices, even though the federal, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia governments are moving in that direction;

• Limited controls on methane flaring that fall short of a federal condition for an engineering study to justify any routine flaring;

• Absence of any language equivalent to a federal regulation that features “world-leading leak detection and repair requirements.”

The differences matter because methane carries about 84 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide over the crucial 20-year period when humanity will be scrambling to get climate change under control. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identifies methane reductions as one of the cheapest paths to the quickest, deepest greenhouse gas emission reductions by 2030.

The AER rule also sets a January 1, 2030 implementation date for the new methane controls that it does mandate. That would put Alberta “a bit behind where the federal regs would be in 2028 and 2029,” Bryant told The Mix, so “Alberta would have to make up for that to achieve equal cumulative emissions reductions” by 2035.

Citing a provincial implementation document [pdf], she added that the AER regulation appeared to achieve a 75% methane reduction by 2035 “according to Alberta’s model,” but “we know that choice of data makes a big difference to the ambition level.” In a technical analysis released last week, Pembina warned that the Alberta approach, which relies on self-reported industry data, has resulted in actual emissions up to 90% higher than official government figures.

“Alberta should not be afraid to modernize its measurement data and methods, including vehicle-based systems, aircraft, and satellites to effectively reduce its methane emissions,” Bryant said at the time.