Alberta Orphan Well Strategy Faces Pushback from Residents, Municipalities, Experts

Originally published by The Energy Mix on October 8, 2025 Author: Jody MacPherson Republished with permission

Hillebrand Steve, USFWS/Pixnio

Pushback is growing among Alberta municipalities, landowners, and concerned residents who say the province is pressing ahead with a regulatory system that lets oil and gas companies dodge taxes, skip rent, and leave orphaned wells behind.

Alberta’s proposed Mature Asset Strategy (MAS), a plan to manage aging oil and gas assets including well closure and cleanup, falls short on two key fronts, said Bill Heidecker, president of the Alberta Surface Rights Federation.

“One, there’s never been a back-end date for having to clean up these wells once they’re no longer producing,” he told a recent virtual town hall. Based on existing rules, he added, companies have decided it’s easier to pay a few thousand dollars a year to leave inactive wells sitting, rather than spend the hundreds of thousands it would take to clean them up.

“They never should have been allowed to do that.”

Second, companies do not allocate funds to clean up their wells in the first place, Heidecker added. Some oil producers trade their liabilities to weaker companies that also lack the means to cover cleanup costs.

The province must set clear deadlines for site cleanups and start collecting money from companies to ensure the work gets done. That’s missing from the proposed MAS, he said.

Coalition Warns of ‘Rigged Plan’

The Coalition For Responsible Energy (C4RE), an alliance of environmental, Indigenous rights, and civil society groups, is warning in a new campaign that the MAS is a “rigged plan.” They say its recommendations, framed by oil veteran David Yager, will leave everyday Albertans paying for well cleanup costs.

About 95 kilometres southwest of Edmonton, in the village of Warburg, the Alberta energy minister’s chief of staff Vitor Marciano was jeered and interrupted when he defended the MAS at a town hall, The Narwhal reported.

Marciano warned attendees that the abandoned well problem would worsen before it improves.

“Folks, companies are going to go down, and more companies are going to go down over the next few years than have gone down in the past,” he said.

Also present was MAS report author Yager, who serves as special advisor to Premier Danielle Smith. He referred to the cleanup problem as “the giant stinking pile of sh*t.”

“This is a mess. It always has been a mess,” he said.

C4RE wants the oil and gas industry held responsible for their “mess” and has launched a website, planned a series of town halls, and initiated a letter writing campaign to mobilize Albertans. Upcoming town halls are planned in Falher and Vegreville, with additional virtual meetings in October.

At C4RE’s Oct. 2 online meeting, 175 people attended, including Marciano, who has been telling Albertans that 20 of the 21 MAS recommendations have been approved and will be proceeding this fall.

C4RE has formally challenged the Alberta Energy Regulator’s decision on the levy amount oil companies must pay for their orphaned wells and filed an ethics complaint against Yager, alleging conflict of interest due to his roles as an AER board member, an oil and gas industry consultant, and an advisor to Smith. The group says 1,700 people have written to the Alberta ethics commissioner asking for an investigation.

Municipal Concerns and Unpaid Taxes

Kara Westerlund, president of the Rural Municipalities of Alberta (RMA), which was consulted on the MAS, told The Energy Mix she is unclear what the next steps are, how RMA will be engaged, and how the plan will be implemented.

“We feel that none of the recommendations should be implemented without a focused specific engagement, and a sharing of information on the impacts of each of the recommendations.”

The RMA, which represents 69 counties and municipal districts in Alberta, has released data showing at least $253.9 million of municipal property taxes that have gone unpaid by oil and gas companies.

There have been no updates from Energy and Minerals Minister Brian Jean, and his press secretary did not respond to emailed questions from The Mix about the MAS’s progress. Many of the recommendations require further working groups and the drafting of new legislation.

Oil and gas companies also often fail to pay rent to landowners. A freedom of information request by The Narwhal found that taxpayers compensated landowners through the Land and Property Rights Tribunal to the tune of C$30 million in 2024, but only $167,000, less than 0.5%, was recovered from delinquent companies.

Legal and Expert Critiques

Three lawyers who’ve been tracking Alberta’s ballooning liability problem for years write in a new University of Calgary law faculty blog post that the regulatory framework has three “chronic deficiencies”: A lack of transparency that impairs public accountability; too much reliance on discretionary power; and too much industry influence in the design of regulations.

“It contains a few useful (and surprising) admissions and a couple potentially promising ideas, but on the whole it focuses on the wrong problems and ultimately promotes deregulation and thinly-disguised new government assistance for the oil and gas industry,” they write. “It obfuscates the real issues rather than illuminating them.”

The lawyers call for a full public inquiry into “Alberta’s unfunded closure liability problem” to prevent costs from being passed to the public.

“Part of the trouble is that what’s happening is not illegal, it’s how the system is set up,” Ecojustice lawyer Susanne Calabrese told C4RE’s virtual town hall.

“The AER approves transfer applications from solvent companies that don’t have any assets and that can’t clean this up,” she said. “There’s no timeline for cleaning up wells the way the law is set up, there’s no security.”

Dr. Norm Campbell of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE) added that the exact toxins in oil and gas wells are under-researched, affecting humans and wildlife.

“It’s a very serious oversight,” he said. “As a general rule, there’s substantive increases in cancers and heart attacks, strokes, dementia, and birth defects.”

“These are major causes of death and disability and rates may be going up by 20% in some of the people living close to these wells.”

Lack of Definition

Critics point out that Yager doesn’t define “mature asset”, a new term for the regulator. There is no tracking of mature assets under that terminology. A search for the phrase on AER’s website returned only two results from July 2025, one in Yager’s biography and the other mentioned by Smith in the AER annual report.

The closest Yager comes to providing a definition is at the beginning of the 52-page document, where he explains that mature assets are “wells that are past or near the end of their production lifespan.”

In a new mandate letter released Oct. 2, Alberta’s premier instructed Jean to coordinate the implementation of the strategy, as well as the AER’s work plan, and a new Liability Management Framework “to ensure the highest global competitiveness in oil and gas development with the strong environmental stewardship Albertans expect.”

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About The Energy Mix: The Energy Mix is an independent, non-profit news service covering the shift to clean energy and the global climate emergency.