A 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, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. 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. A court in Alberta sided with the receiver in May 2016, reducing companies’ concerns about the legal liability of walking away from some of their oil wells. Since then, the number of inactive, abandoned, or otherwise orphaned sites has more than doubled to 3,200, according to the Orphan Well Association, the cleanup group. The provincial government has given the organization an emergency loan to fund the growing costs. Read more.
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