Selected timeline related to orphan wells in Alberta, Canada is a list of events relevant to orphan wells in Alberta, Canada. Orphan wells are inactive oil or gas well sites that have no solvent owner that can be held legally or financially accountable for the decommissioning and reclamation obligations to ensure public safety and to address environmental liabilities.

1910s

1910s The province's oldest inactive well has been dormant and unreclaimed since June 30, 1918.

1920s 1920s Some of the legacy sites were in operation in the 1920s or earlier, and have no known operator and no "financial security to cover the cleanup costs."

1940s 1940s Alberta's oil industry experienced a big boom.

1950s Canada's oil production in 1946 was only of oil per day. By 1956, Alberta was producing per day.

1950s The boom in Alberta's oil industry continued.

1960s 1960s One of Alberta's most significant "busts" in the boom and bust cycle.

1970s 1970s Alberta's oil industry experienced a big boom.

1980s 1980s One of Alberta's most significant "busts" that lasted about a decade.

1990s Alberta's oil industry experienced a big boom. 1991 June 12 In Panamericana v. Northern Badger Oil & Gas Ltd. the Court of Appeal of Alberta ruled that "abandonment of oil and gas wells is part of the general law of Alberta enacted to protect the environment and for the health and safety of all citizens." 1999 There were about 40,000 inactive wells in Alberta; by about 2008, there were 60,000, and by 2018, there were 89,217.

2000s January The Alberta Energy and Utilities Board (EUB) established the Public Safety and Sour Gas (PSSG) independent committee to "review and assess the province's regulatory regime as it related to health and safety". Sour gas contains significant amounts of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) which is toxic to animals. There were more than "6,000 sour gas wells, approximately 250 sour gas processing plants and over 18,000 km of operating sour gas pipelines" in the province. The PSSG spent a year consulting with communities that were impacted by sour gas extraction, including 16 Aboriginal communities with the aim of improving regulation of sour gas to reduce its negative effects on public health and safety. 2001 to 2004 Encana and other energy companies "carpet-bombed"drilled "thousands of shallow wells" in Alberta's Wheatland County, in communities such as Redland and Rosebud, Alberta in "coal-bed methane and sand formations." In Ernst v. EnCana Corporation, an unsuccessful 2007 gross negligence $33-million lawsuit filed against Encana, the Alberta government, and the provincial regulator, Energy Resources Conservation Board, the litigant said that "well water was contaminated with explosive volumes of methane and other chemicals". While the lawsuit failed, it was a catalyst for the taxpayer-funded $10 million dollar project to pipe water into the communities where the wells had been drilled, as their ground water was so heavily contaminated. 2002 The industry-led Orphan Well Association (OWA) was established. It is an independent, non-profit organization. 2002 Perpetual Energy Inc. was created as a spin out of Paramount Resources, owned by Clayton Riddell. Riddell served as Perpetual's Chairman until his death in 2018. Riddell owned 41.7% of Perpetual Energy Inc. and his daughter, Susan Riddell Rose, who is Perpetual's CEO, owned 4.8%. 2006 More than 33% of the province's "annual natural gas production was sour gas (1.6 trillion cubic feet)".

2010s

2010s Global oil price decreased in the 2010s 2012 The OWA only had 14 classified orphan wells; in 2013 there were 74; in 2014 there were 162; in 2015 there were 705. During the last bust period in the cyclefrom 2012 to 2017the number of orphan wells increased from 74 in 2012 to 3,200. There were fewer than 300 orphan wells designated orphan wells on the Orphan Well Inventory. In 2012, Lexin had acquired most of its assets from Compton Petroleum Corp, a public company starting in 1996, which was once one of the largest intermediate oil and gas producers in Calgary. In 2006, Compton's capital spending was earmarked at $526 million. During a failed attempt at selling the company in 2008, Compton's shares fell from $12.80 a share to $2.60 within months. In 2012, when Compton was acquired by then New York-based MFC Industrial Ltd., Compton's capital spending was earmarked at just $14 million to $16 million. MFC Industrial at that time had a "record of spinning value out of troubled assets". Michael Smith, then Chairman of MFC, became director of the Mazeppa gas plant, a Lexin subsidiary. In 2014, there were 162 orphan wells. From 2014 to 2016 global oil prices experienced the "largest...declines in modern history". This led to the longest decline in oil prices since the 1980s. 2015 AER representatives reported to a meeting of Oklahoma's Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission meeting on surface casing vent flow (SCVF) and gas migration (GM) that by the end of 2015, there was a total of 600,000 wells drilled in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. January 28 The appendix, "Methane from Leaking Abandoned Wells: Health and Safety Issues", for the 2016 AER report was completed by Monique G. Dubé. There were 705 wells in the OWA's inventory. In 2015, there were about 800 oil and gas licensees in the province who contributed annually to the OWA levy. This includes the 17 major energy companies as well as smaller "mom and pop companies". The average cost of reclamation/remediation (R/R) site services in 2015 was $180,000 per site and range from $20,000 to $1 million. This provides work during downturns in the oil industry. When Redwater Energy declared bankruptcy in 2015 and said they could not clean up over a thousand orphan wells, this raised environmental concerns in what the CBC reported as a "tsunami of orphaned oil and gas wells" from 200 in 2014 to "3,127 wells that need to be plugged or abandoned, and a further 1,553 sites that have been abandoned but still need to be reclaimed". On January 31, 2019, in the case of Redwater Energy, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled 5–2 overturning "two lower court decisions that said bankruptcy law has paramountcy over provincial environmental responsibilities". The Supreme Court of Canada "allowed an appeal brought by the AER and the OWA from the decision of the Alberta Court of Appeal in Orphan Well Association v Grant Thornton Limited (Redwater). The "case has been one of the most closely watched by the Canadian oil and gas industry in decades". Redwater lawyers said that it was not possible for the company to comply with both the federal and provincial legislation in regards to the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act (BIA). The January 31 ruling means that "bankruptcy is not a licence to ignore environmental regulations, and there is no inherent conflict between federal bankruptcy laws and provincial environmental regulations." In 2015, two Alberta courts found in favour of the oil and gas company Redwater Energy's receiver against the AER. Redwater had filed for bankruptcy as a result of the "oil price collapse" and the AER wanted to recuperate funds from the any sales Redwater made, to "help pay to clean up after Redwater's inactive wells as required by provincial regulations". By going into bankruptcy, Redwater avoided paying for its Asset retirement obligations (ARO). In 2015, nine different contractors working on projects at Mazeppa filed a lawsuit against the Lexin subsidiary. Smith disputed the contractors' claim. By 2015, MFC Industrial Ltd. had changed its name MFC Bancorp Ltd., its focus to merchant banking with its listing as a trading company in Vancouver, BC, and its commercial headquarters in Austria. As a result, by 2015, the southern Alberta oil and gas properties' ownership became "complex and opaque." In October 2015, the new ownership group stopped annual surface lease compensation pay to hundreds of landowners in southern Alberta where the company had "Lexin wells". Landowners who wished to complain were directed to the company's office in Hong Kong. The landowners were encouraged to recover the unpaid compensation from the Surface Rights Board instead of the ownership group. According to financial records cited in the Calgary Herald, in late 2015, Bancroft had sold a controlling interest in these southern Alberta assets to an " undisclosed buyer"—then listed as having zero net value. Calgary Herald reported that, as of 2017, company statements and court records show that the Austrian-headquartered MFC Bancorp as Lexin company trustee, was still the "controlling registered shareholder." 2016 It is alleged in a court filing that in 2016 Susan Riddell Rose "engineered the sale of a subsidiary called Perpetual Energy Operating Corp. (PEOC), later renamed Sequoia", to Chinese investors. In May 2016, the Court of Queen's Bench of Alberta (ABQB) in 2016 ABQB 278, "confirmed that the federal Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act supersedes the provincial requirements that companies must clean up wells." "Bankrupt companies can avoid their liabilities and leave them as a public obligation." By November 2016, when Mazeppa gas plant contractors won their lawsuit against a Lexin subsidiaries—LR Processing Partnership and LR Processing Ltd.—forcing them into receivership, the company appealed. AER received complaints in 2016 from a number of concerned employees about Lexin's cost-saving neglect of required maintenance resulting operational safety issues. When Lexin Resources was shut down, reasons cited included concerns about the environment and safety issues. Following the AER's decision, the industry-led OWA took on the responsibility of ensuring that Lexin's 1,200 wells were "shuttered and safe" while awaiting the outcome, which could mean new buyers of wells or Lexin's compliance with the rules and its resumption of control of its assets. November 26 Monique G. Dubé presented AER with the 33-page preliminary analysis, "D79 Abandoned Well Methane Toxicity Assessment", on behalf of AER's Environmental Science Branch and Closure and Liability Branch, which included a map view of AER's Abandoned Wells. The AER assessment identified about 1,500 abandoned wells in urban centers. This includes wells with various license status, including Abandoned, Reclamation Certified and Reclamation Exempt. In rural areas, the assessment identified about 170,000 abandoned wells. In May 2016, the Court of Queen's Bench of Alberta (ABQB) in 2016 ABQB 278, "confirmed that the federal Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act supersedes the provincial requirements that companies must clean up wells." "Bankrupt companies can avoid their liabilities and leave them as a public obligation.": 8  Court of Appeal of Alberta then overturned the decision ruling that environmental obligations were less of a priority that the debts owed. The Redwater case is an example of how the conflict of those two jurisdictions come into play—Oil and Gas Conservation Act (OGCA) is the provincial statute or law dealing with licensing, producing, and managing aspects of all oil and gas assets in Alberta and the federal Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act (BIA). Prior to 2017, the energy industry paid $15 million a year into the Orphan Fund Levy. It doubled to $30 million in 2017. The Calgary, Alberta-headquartered Well Integrity And Abandonment Society (WIA)was founded by Jay Williams who also founded the Canadian Society for Gas Migration (CSGM). The CSGM focused on Service Casing Vent Flow. Both organization are composed of oil and gas professionals and their mandates focus on well bore integrity, including "well abandonment, well integrity, gas migration, ventflow, well construction, cementing, well logging, and plugs".