When quadding this spring on his land just southeast of Didsbury, Alta., 59-year-old Pat Williams can’t miss the herd of heavy equipment that’s returned to his farm for a second year. On one of his three quarter-sections, Williams pastures 65 Angus cows who were recently about to calve. On the other two he farms rotating crops of wheat, canola and barley. And for 50 years, there has been an oil well on each of the quarters.
The wells on Williams’s land, drilled back in the ’50s and ’60s, stopped pumping in 2012 after the last owner, Neo Exploration Inc., went under. He never worried about the health impacts on his family—the wells were tested often for air and ground contaminants and posed no risks. But other Alberta property owners stuck with orphaned wells attribute chronic health problems and even deaths to leakages from them.
But such moves seem puny compared to the scale of the problem. In April, a new coalition of former regulators, researchers and landowners called the Alberta Liabilities Disclosure Project stepped up the fight to make the oil and gas industry do more. Using freedom of information laws, it dug up internal AER documents that revealed the estimated cost of cleaning up Alberta’s oil and gas wells would be between $40 billion and $70 billion. That’s far more than the $18.
“It was nice to see the pump jacks gone,” says Williams. For decades he had to drive his equipment around the six- or seven-acre teardrop-shaped areas leased by the oil companies for each well. “It was a pain.”