Selected timeline related to orphan wells in Alberta

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.

[1][2][3] 1910s The province's oldest inactive well has been dormant and unreclaimed since June 30, 1918.

[4] 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.

[7]: 5 [9] gas industry, all with the focus of mitigating gas migration and surface casing vent flow issues throughout not only Alberta, but Canada as a whole May 1 The OWA's inventory listed "2963 orphan wells for abandonment, 297 orphan facilities for decommissioning, 3781 orphan pipeline segments for abandonment, 3116 orphan sites for reclamation, and 939 orphan reclaimed sites.

Alberta oil derricks, 1920s
The small hamlet of Drayton Valley grew rapidly after Pembina oil was discovered in 1954, and became Alberta's first model oil town. [ 7 ] : 272 This was the period when many wells were drilled; by 2017, there were approximately 400,000 in Alberta. [ 8 ]
The area in green, as of 2010, shows only a fraction of the oil fields in Alberta, where 400,000 wells dot the entire province—drilled for conventional oil . By 2022, only 156,031 of these wells were active. [ 18 ] The area in brown, the Athabasca oil sands , now produces most of the oil in Alberta, which is unconventional oil .
While Alberta produces over 2.8 million barrels a day of unconventional oil; conventional oil production is less than 500,000 barrels per day. [ 67 ] This chart shows percentages of global reserves.