Fight Over Abandoned Oil Wells in Canada May Go to Top Court
- Regulator, receiver spar over who should bear cleanup costs
- Number of orphaned oil sites surges after energy price drop
A pumpjack pumps oil from a well on a farmer's frozen field in a Pembina oil field near Pigeon Lake, Alberta, Canada on Friday, Feb. 17, 2012. The Pembina oil field is one of the largest oil fields in the province of Alberta.
Photographer: Norm Betts/BloombergA battle over whether energy-company creditors should help pay for cleaning up thousands of abandoned oil wells in Canada may be heading to the country’s Supreme Court.
At the center of the dispute is Redwater Energy Corp., a small publicly traded oil producer in Alberta that filed for bankruptcy in late 2015. The receiver that’s liquidating the company argues it should be able to sell its best wells and leave the worst behind for an energy industry-funded group to clean up. The province’s regulator argues that buyers should have to take both good and bad wells, even if it means that the sale proceeds will be lower.