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Paper short abstract

Building on my 2019 work, this paper reads Alberta’s orphaned wells as “active ruins.” I trace how new liability reforms and mandated closure spending reshape responsibility, intensify polarisation, and open new imaginaries for petro-futures through managed ruination.

Paper long abstract

Building from my 2019 ethnographic analysis of orphaned wells as oil assets “gone bad”—where insolvency, debt, and competing ethics of value creation and care collide—this paper asks what new polarisations and possibilities are being produced through Alberta’s current provincial and regulatory responses to the orphan well problem. Rather than treating orphan wells as inert leftovers of a past boom, I approach them as active ruins: material, legal, and affective infrastructures that intensify conflicts over responsibility for extraction’s afterlives, while also opening imaginative horizons for energy futures.

I examine how ruination is being administratively re-scripted through the Alberta Energy Regulator’s liability management reforms, including the Licensee Capability Assessment, inventory-reduction targets, and mandatory “closure” spending requirements that translate uncertain futures into measurable obligations. These instruments also enable new forms of anticipatory accounting—such as crediting or “banking” over-compliance—where remediation becomes not only an environmental practice but a portable proof of responsibility. In parallel, adjustments to the Orphan Fund levy rework how collective accountability is priced, distributed, and politically defended.

Tracing these policy devices alongside landowner anxieties, service-sector “closure economies,” and state narratives of responsible energy development, I argue that Alberta’s orphan-well solutions are producing a distinctive form of managed ruination. This management can harden polarisation (polluter-pays vs public backstops; rural burdens vs provincial imaginaries of prosperity), yet it can also generate unexpected openings for re-use, repair, and alternative relations to the remains of extraction—where endings and beginnings coexist in the same contaminated ground.