was it corruption that made you quit?
Not corruption but an atmosphere of incompetence aided by an old boys club that revolved around people who had come up through the company working in SE Alberta (the shallow, low pressure gas on CFB Suffield, etc). Once Randy Eresman became the CEO, technical excellence in asset integrity and environmental practices became a minor tertiary concern amid a culture where upper management encouraged employees to "challenge the regulations and the regulators"... even in cases where there was sound engineering principles, practice and history behind them. I decided to look for a new job rather than work for a bunch of incompetant schmucks who were making money primarily because they were lucky that the Alberta gov't had given them some pretty sweet deals on land when they formed the company.
But that corporate restructuring occurred after Ludwig was already in jail. While Ludwig was doing his thing, AEC's West business unit was probably the most diligent energy company in Canada when it came to deal with issues involving sour production and prevention of leaks.
I suppose it has nothing to do with fracking. Most of the watersheds in North America are polluted with gas from fracking. That is what happens in a lot of oil fields other than the tar sands. You shatter the bed rock and gas seeps into the water sheds.
This is the voice of ignorance on several levels. I'll just deal with the main one. In short, the major problem with fraccing is that some companies don't know how to deal with the fluids: they try to short cut things and just dump flowback and excess fluids rather than go the more expensive route of disposing of them properly. Hydraulic fracturing doesn't have the force to bust through the layers of strata. The real culprit of communication between formations is improper cementing, which can be remediated, although it is hard to prove where it is an issue, in order to target the appropriate wells.
My point was, because of Wiebo, the oil companies have started to move....slowly, but they have started. Wiebo has had a positive impact. It certainly wasn't a sudden idea on the part of the oil companies.
You're wrong: many oil and gas companies tried to avoid issues with landowners long before Ludwig, simply because pissed off landowners make it more difficult (through various appeal processes) and expensive (!) to obtain surface rights for leases to drill on and build facilities on and rights of way to build pipelines. If anything, Ludwig set the evolution of energy companies back through his antics and adversarial stance and encouragement of others to follow his lead.