Which Alberta Operators Are Actually Closing Their Wells

By Phaseview | Published July 28, 2026

By our count from AER well-status records, only about 21% of Alberta's licensed wells have been fully reclaimed - certified, cleaned up and signed off (another ~7% predate today's rules and are formally exempt). But a single province-wide average, however you slice it, is almost useless - because it hides the only thing that matters: reclamation isn't happening evenly, and the gap between the operators doing the work and the ones falling behind is enormous.

We can finally show that gap, operator by operator, from public filings with the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER). But first we have to fix how it's measured.

The number the industry gets wrong

The usual way to rank an operator is reclaimed wells as a share of its total wells. That metric quietly punishes the busiest producers. A company still pumping ten thousand active wells will always look like a laggard on that measure, not because it's neglecting anything, but because most of its wells simply aren't finished yet. They're producing.

The honest question is narrower: of the wells an operator is actually done with - abandoned or reclaimed - what share has it cleaned up? We call that the closure rate, and it's the view the industry rarely sees. One caution up front, because it matters: an "abandoned" well is not a neglected one. In AER terms it has already been sealed and made safe - that's the hard first half of the job done - and what remains is the surface reclamation, which routinely lags by years through assessment, remediation and a real certificate backlog. So a low closure rate can mean a genuine walk-away, or simply reclamation still working through the queue. We read it alongside well age and status, not as a verdict - but across enough operators, the pattern of who finishes and who doesn't is unmistakable.

On that basis, across the medium-to-large operators (50 or more wells) with enough finished wells to judge, the median closure rate is about 45% - and a quarter of them have closed less than a fifth of their finished wells.

Explore it yourself

The dots below are operators. Scroll through and watch the field sort itself out.

Scale is no excuse

The most useful thing the data kills is the excuse that closing wells is too hard at scale. It isn't. ConocoPhillips - still an active Alberta operator - has closed 88% of its roughly 6,600 finished wells, and Peyto is above 90% while it's still actively drilling, cleaning up as it goes rather than leaving a pile for later. Others with near-complete records - Devon Canada and BP Canada among them - reached those numbers largely by winding down their Alberta operations and finishing on the way out. That is its own kind of proof - the work gets done - but sustaining it while you are still growing is the rarer feat. These are big inventories, fully in hand. When comparable large operators show very different closure rates, scale alone clearly isn't the explanation.

At the other end of the field sit operators with large inventories of finished wells and very little cleaned up. Most of them are still in business, so we don't name them - many have legitimate reasons, and on a subject this consequential the data should speak for itself rather than becoming a hall of shame. But the backlog is real, and it grows every year.

When an operator simply fails

The starkest cases are the companies that no longer exist - and here the record is public, so we will name them. Cross-referencing our chart against a decade of AER enforcement, Orphan Well Association records, and insolvency filings, roughly 30 operators plotted here have since gone through receivership or bankruptcy, or had their wells orphaned to the OWA.

The largest is recent. Long Run Exploration went into receivership in 2025, and in 2026 the AER designated its 4,031 wells and hundreds of facilities as orphans - an estimated $476-million cleanup now on the OWA's books, the single biggest addition to the orphan inventory to date. AlphaBow Energy has been insolvent since 2024, and after years of AER enforcement its sites are under the Orphan Well Association's care - but, unlike Long Run, it is still working through CCAA and contesting the AER's orders in court, so its roughly 3,000-plus wells are supervised rather than formally orphaned (the AER pegs its deemed end-of-life liability near $205 million). Further back, Trident Exploration walked away from about 4,700 wells in 2019, and Sequoia Resources' collapse orphaned some 2,500 sites. Even the landmark Redwater case - the one that went to the Supreme Court and established that a bankrupt company's cleanup obligations aren't just another debt it can shed, and a trustee can't walk away from them to pay creditors first - is a dot on this chart. Others - Lexin Resources, Manitok Energy, Strategic Oil & Gas, SanLing Energy, and more - each left their own backlog behind. None of these wells clean themselves. They become orphans, and the cleanup falls to the rest of the industry.

Why this is a public-service question

This is where it stops being about individual companies. By our count from AER records, the operators on this chart are together sitting on roughly 96,000 wells that have been sealed (abandoned) but not yet reclaimed. That count is a hard number; the dollar figure attached to it is not. These wells are already decommissioned - the downhole sealing is done - so the work still owed is surface reclamation, which the OWA's 2025/26 annual report puts at about $27,700 a well. That comes to on the order of $2.7 billion of reclamation still to do across this backlog. But that is only the wells already sealed. Province-wide, another ~70,000 wells are suspended - idle, but not yet decommissioned - and each still needs both the downhole sealing and the surface reclamation, about $56,500 a well. Add those in and Alberta's estimated end-of-life liability rises to roughly $6.7 billion. Suspended wells belong in that total because reactivation is rare - the AER reports fewer than 0.2% of wells idle a decade are ever brought back - and even this figure still excludes the far larger inventory of wells that are currently producing, so the full eventual bill runs higher again, into the tens of billions on the AER's own numbers. These are flat-rate estimates, not audited totals: real per-well costs vary widely with depth, age and location, some wells are reclamation-exempt or get re-entered, and the OWA notes its averages swing year to year. Even so, by our calculation roughly 88% of the reclamation owed today sits with companies that are still operating. As long as they stay solvent, they pay for their own cleanup. When one fails, that obligation doesn't vanish - it shifts to the Orphan Well Association, funded mainly by a levy on the rest of the industry (about $144 million in 2025/26). So the working operators effectively pay to clean up after the failed ones. And the public is increasingly exposed behind them: through interest-free provincial and federal loans to the OWA (hundreds of millions still to be repaid), and through the surface-lease rents Alberta pays landowners while orphan sites sit for years. Whether the levy can keep pace is hotly contested - a 2025 analysis put the OWA's shortfall at roughly $1.2 billion - and that is precisely the fight over who ultimately holds the bill.

We could turn that into a list of "companies most likely to fail." We won't, and it's worth being clear why: predicting insolvency takes financial data - debt, cash flow, the AER's own Liability Management Framework - that we deliberately don't guess at. Ranking a solvent, going-concern company as a future taxpayer liability off a well-count proxy would be both unfair and wrong; the largest single cleanup obligation in the province belongs to one of its most financially secure operators, precisely because it owns the most wells.

What the public record can do is raise the fair question, and make the raw material visible: who is quietly falling behind faster than they clean up? That's a question for regulators, investors, and voters - and now the evidence to ask it is in the open.

The fairness check

None of this is a morality tale. A low closure rate can reflect a genuinely young inventory that simply hasn't reached the cleanup stage, an unusual well type, or a book of assets recently acquired from someone else. Every well here is attributed to the operator that currently holds its AER licence, regardless of who drilled or abandoned it - so an operator can carry backlog it inherited through acquisition. That's exactly why we measure closure of finished wells, show the age profile on the page, and keep the going concerns anonymous. The goal isn't to convict anyone; it's to make a multi-billion-dollar question legible for the first time.

See where any operator sits

Every figure here is reproducible on the Operator Deep Dives page - search any operator to see its closure record, its abandoned-well backlog, and the consulting firms it hires to do the work. The consultant side of this story - which firms are actually doing Alberta's environmental work - is worth reading alongside it.

All figures derived from AER well lifecycle data and filed environmental reports. Closure rate = reclaimed wells / (reclaimed + abandoned) wells. Estimated liability figures are modelled approximations. Trident Exploration and SanLing Energy details are drawn from public receivership and regulatory records.