In September 2024, the Alberta Energy Regulator approved the transfer of hundreds of oil and gas wells and related facilities to MAGA Energy, short for Make Alberta Great Again, despite the company’s dire financial situation — and regulations meant to block struggling companies from taking over new sites. The company’s financial troubles are documented in a Jan. 24, 2025, email obtained by The Narwhal and sent by MAGA Energy’s vice-president of operations, Mark Ross, to a landowner. MAGA has been in “survival mode over the last 14 months,” Ross said in the email, adding the company “has not been able to pay landowners and other vendors for many months.” “MAGA is in difficult times right now,” he wrote, noting another company, Tidewater Midstream, which he said has processed 90 per cent of MAGA’s natural gas and oil, had shut their facilities in Acheson, Alta., in late 2023. “Our revenues have been chopped by 90 per cent as a result.” MAGA Energy declined to answer detailed questions from The Narwhal, including about the contents of the January 2025 email, and did not confirm or deny that it sent the email. Nine months after MAGA lost its processor — and according to the email, most of its revenue — the regulator approved MAGA Energy’s takeover of 170 oil and gas wells, 30 related facilities and 47 pipeline licences from another company, Journey Energy. When financially struggling companies take over old oil and gas wells, they may not pay the bills associated with those wells, or they may choose not to cover cleanup costs. That’s why regulations exist to ensure proposed licence transfers are vetted. The email, shared with The Narwhal by another disgruntled landowner and confirmed with the original recipient (who did not want to be identified) — raises serious questions about the regulator’s ability to prevent unstable companies from taking over more oil and gas wells. When financially struggling companies take over old wells, they may not be able — or may choose not — to pay landowners land lease payments, cover cleanup costs or pay municipal taxes. MAGA’s email outlining its financial struggles was in response to the landowner reaching out about missing land lease payments they claimed were owed. In the email, Ross said the company expected to be on solid footing by the middle of 2025 and then directed the landowner to a government tribunal that uses tax dollars to reimburse landowners when oil and companies don’t pay their leases. “In the meantime,” he wrote. “I have advised landowners to contact the provincial government’s Land and Property Rights Tribunal where you can put in a claim for the outstanding rental payments.” “The government will then ensure that they get paid by MAGA in due course as they have many ways of ensuring that the funds will be recovered by MAGA.” Data shows the government fails to collect those funds more than 99 per cent of the time, and, instead, taxpayers foot the bill. Jennifer Stephenson is waiting on lease payments from MAGA Energy for wells the company owns on her property. Her recourse is to get reimbursed by the provincial government, but she doesn’t believe her tax dollars should cover the company’s obligations. Meanwhile, MAGA, which has also dipped its toes into Bitcoin mining, has missed hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments to landowners, according to an Alberta government tribunal. “I don’t know how many companies are like MAGA — they’re not the only ones, they can’t be,” Jennifer Stephenson, a landowner with four MAGA wells on her property, previously told The Narwhal. “We’ll get paid through the government, but that gets to be a moot point.” Stephenson said of the government using tax dollars to pay landowners. “I’m paying myself.” Government collects less than one per cent of missing lease payments A database of tribunal decisions shows the government has covered hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of what it found to be unpaid leases for MAGA Energy. The database contains 175 individual tribunal decisions related to MAGA Energy, which The Narwhal sorted through one by one, as the Land and Property Rights Tribunal declined to provide a detailed breakdown of how much it has paid out on behalf of the company. It also said it was not responsible for trying to collect the money from delinquent companies. The tribunal did say wait times are down sharply this year and that the situation is expected to improve as it updates its services, including a pilot project to streamline repeat applications. “Under this pilot, landowners will no longer need to submit a new application to the Land and Property Rights Tribunal for each year payment has not been made,” Mike Hartfield, the executive director of the tribunal, said by email. “In prior years, due to the large volume of applications being received, decision timelines extended to one year or longer, so we’re seeing some considerable improvement in that regard,” he said. The tribunal has paid $27 million so far in 2025-26. Treasury Board and Finance, the ministry that oversees Crown debt collection, did not respond to questions from The Narwhal by publication time. But MAGA isn’t the only company to have its obligations covered by the province. Previous reporting by The Narwhal showed the government doled out almost $150 million to cover leases from oil and gas companies in the province between 2010 and 2024. The government only recovered $1.4 million from oil and gas companies in that same time — less than one per cent. In 2024, the government paid $30 million to cover the lease obligations of private companies, a 4,500 per cent increase since 2010. Data obtained via a freedom of information request shows just $167,000 — less than half a per cent of the total paid out in 2024 — was recovered from the companies that missed payments. The issue of lease payments, however, is just one factor the regulator is supposed to consider when approving a transfer of licences. Alberta Energy Regulator has a system that’s supposed to stop delinquent companies from taking on new wells The Alberta Energy Regulator approved the transfer of wells, pipelines and facilities from Journey Energy to MAGA Energy on Sept. 13, 2024. Transfer documents from the regulator show MAGA is the majority owner of all but one well transferred from Journey and all of the facilities. According to the regulator’s own policies, a licence transfer is supposed to trigger a “holistic licencee assessment of both the transferor and transferee.” The regulator can also demand a security deposit prior to the approval of a transfer if it deems there’s an increased risk. A ministerial order issued to the regulator by former Alberta Energy Minister Peter Guthrie in 2023, which was in effect at the time of the MAGA transfer, prevents the regulator from approving the transfer of licences to or from a company that owes more than $20,000 in unpaid municipal taxes. An updated order maintains that threshold. In addition to landowners that claim they are not receiving lease payments from MAGA Energy, the company has outstanding tax bills owed to Sturgeon County. According to the minutes from a Sturgeon County council meeting, MAGA Energy owed the county almost $400,000 in taxes in July 2023 and was denied its request for a monthly payment plan, but the company and the county came to an agreement for repaying its taxes in September of that year. A spokesperson for Sturgeon County said MAGA was required to pay its outstanding 2023 taxes in full. “MAGA Energy made a portion of the payment back to the county; but there was still an amount owing,” according to the county. “The breach of the agreement was reported to the Alberta Energy Regulator on March 15, 2024, as part of the regular quarterly oil and gas reporting. MAGA Energy has not made any further payment towards the arrears, nor have they paid any current taxes for 2024 or 2025. MAGA Energy continues to incur penalties on these amounts.” The county confirmed the amount owing exceeded the $20,000 threshold set out in the ministerial order. The company is not on a list of companies that have failed to pay taxes in Brazeau County, where Stephenson lives and where MAGA has a cluster of wells, revealed in a council agenda package in 2025. A spokesperson for Leduc County said they were unable to share any information about whether MAGA was in arrears. The Alberta Energy Regulator said any licence transfer would have to comply with the ministerial order in place at the time, which can include a payment plan for overdue taxes. “In this case, MAGA Energy Ltd. met the requirements to proceed,” according to an unsigned email from the regulator. “Details of the evidence MAGA provided is not public information; it is between MAGA and the municipality or municipalities in which the arrears existed at that time.” The regulator did not immediately respond when asked about the amount outstanding with Sturgeon County. According to provincial policy, any transfer of an oil and gas well licence is supposed to trigger a “holistic” assessment before being approved. While MAGA Energy’s acquisition of 170 wells was approved in September 2024, the company’s ability to acquire additional licences was subsequently suspended in June 2025. In June, the regulator suspended MAGA’s ability to acquire new licences due to its failure to meet its annual liability spending quota — the amount a company must pay to safely shut down and clean up old facilities. The regulator could suspend MAGA’s operations if it doesn’t provide a security deposit to satisfy its obligations. It’s unclear why the September 2024 transfer was approved when the company was in financial distress, or whether that information was available to the regulator at the time of the transfer. It’s also not known if the regulator asked for a security deposit for this transfer. The regulator did not answer specific questions from The Narwhal regarding the licence transfer to MAGA Energy, aside from the question of municipal taxes, and instead pointed to links on its website regarding regulatory oversight for transfers. Shaun Fluker, a law professor and executive director of the Public Interest Law Clinic at the University of Calgary who has extensively studied energy regulation in Alberta, said there are serious questions about what information the regulator actually collects and how it uses that information. “If you just read the Alberta Energy Regulator’s materials, it sounds like they’re doing a fabulous job, it says all the right things,” he said. “The problem is there’s real doubt that they actually do this work. And even if they do, there’s real doubt that they use it.” Fluker said there is a lack of transparency that prevents scrutiny of the regulations and their application in the real world, including whether the regulator demanded security in the case of transfer to MAGA Energy in 2024. At the end of that line of regulatory decisions are landowners. Landowners say they are out money — and out of patience Karl Zajes says he too is owed money from MAGA for wells on his property in a rural area of Alberta west of Edmonton in Leduc County. He said he filed his claim with the Land and Property Rights Tribunal in February and is still waiting for compensation. Several landowners who spoke with The Narwhal, representing five different properties with a dozen MAGA wells between them, said there’s been a lack of communication from the company and they are frustrated with having to go to the tribunal for payment. Collectively, the group says they are owed approximately $40,000 since the cheques stopped coming at the beginning of the year. Stephenson, who lives near Zajes in Brazeau County, said she is owed more than $17,000 for MAGA wells on her property and is angry the company was allowed to take over the sites. Karl Zajes is among a small group of landowners who say they are collectively owed at least $40,000 from MAGA Energy. “Up here, 99 per cent of the time they’re super, super good,” she said of oil and gas companies operating in the area. “And there is that one per cent that, it shouldn’t happen.” She questioned why the transfer from Journey to MAGA went through and said problems started soon after the change in ownership. “Why are you allowing that to happen?” Stephenson asked. The Alberta government did not respond to questions from The Narwhal by publication time. MAGA Energy also received federal funds It’s not just lease payments that are outstanding from MAGA Energy, nor is it the only time the government has covered the company’s costs. The company received at least $650,000 in well remediation help from the federally funded site rehabilitation program, which was administered by the province. Data for the first three rounds of funding were never released, so that figure could be higher. It also doesn’t include any money the company may have received for its previous wells on the Enoch Cree Nation that received site rehabilitation funds. As a private company, assessing its operations is difficult and there is no publicly available financial information, but Ross’s email to the landowner said MAGA was negotiating with “a major financial funder that will enable the gas plant and battery to be restarted and thus enabling our production to resume.”MAGA Energy did not respond to multiple requests for interviews over the span of a week. The Narwhal visited the company’s headquarters in downtown Calgary to hand-deliver a list of questions and spoke with Ross.“We’ve been talking about this today and how we approach this, because we’re not sure there’s a win in it for us,” he said, before declining to speak on the record prior to reviewing the questions. Ross contacted The Narwhal the next day and said the company was unable to respond prior to publication time, but would provide answers at a later time. Recent Posts Doug Ford is abandoning his own climate commitments The Ontario government is repealing its law requiring a provincial climate plan and emissions reduction… Alberta let an oil and gas company ‘in survival mode’ take over 170 wells. Now it’s not paying its bills Nov. 6, 2025 11 min. read In an email obtained by The Narwhal, MAGA Energy recommended landowners ask the government for… The Narwhal wins Jack Webster award for rich storytelling about Gitanyow fire practices The Narwhal’s feature documenting a prescribed burn in Gitanyow territory was recognized at an annual…
Alberta let an oil and gas company in survival mode take over 170 wells. Now its not paying its bills
