Dennis Byrne and his wife Barb built a good life. He flew passenger jets around the world, she practiced physiotherapy. He harvested their fields, too, cultivating the land for years and occasionally grumbling about the oil access road that crossed his property. He’s older now: 82. Not much time in the tractor and his knees only bend as far as he took his post-surgical recovery, which means they don’t bend very far. But the Byrnes were smart. They saved and they budgeted, intending to stay in their home, one hour west of Edmonton near the agricultural community of Warburg, Alta., until the end. “I told everybody, if they can’t find me, walk down to that creek there. I’ll be leaning against a tree somewhere, that’s as far as I’m going,” he says, pointing to the stand of trees downhill from an old oil well. Byrne says he retired with a “damn good pension,” but money is still tighter all of a sudden. The access road leads to that old well that now sits idle. Across the way on the other side of his property, another well, the one he calls “a mess,” sits overgrown, inactive and dismantled. Byrne says the lease payments stopped coming a few months back for both wells, and the company isn’t returning calls. Money has suddenly gotten tighter for Dennis Byrne and his wife Barb. The couple were careful after they retired, but lease payments have stopped coming in from the old oil wells on their property outside of Edmonton, Alta. “We’re short,” he says. “Barb figured we’re short three cheques, but up until just this last little while, everything was fine, and then all of a sudden they just quit coming.”The Byrnes aren’t alone. Up the road, Karl Zajes, the tireless organizer of the local surface rights group, has two sites for which he says he’s owed money. A little farther up, Russell and Joanne Liba have one. To the south, Jennifer Stephenson has four sites and her neighbour Cindy Terrabain has three. All of them are owned by MAGA Energy, short for Make Alberta Great Again, which bought 170 wells, 30 facilities and 47 pipeline licences in the area in September 2024. Some of that infrastructure is still in use, some is inactive, but many landowners say they have been left in the lurch, forcing them to go to a government tribunal to ask for tax money to cover the missing payments. They’re still waiting to hear from the tribunal. MAGA — short for Make Alberta Great Again — Energy purchased nearly 200 old oil wells outside of Edmonton in September 2024, and the company now owes landowners in the area payments for surface leases. Regulations to keep financially strained companies from purchasing new wells aren’t working as they’re meant to, landowners say. It’s a familiar story across Alberta, a province where landowners aren’t allowed to refuse oil and gas wells on their properties, but are paid by the companies that own the wells for the loss of land. The history of faltering companies cutting off those lease payments, however, is long, thanks to an equally long history of regulatory failure and a lack of government oversight. Regulations meant to keep financially strained companies from acquiring new wells aren’t working as they should, and the criteria used by the energy regulator to determine the financial health of a company aren’t public, making it difficult to assess the effectiveness of the process. “Whatever oil they’re bringing up, they’re paying royalties on it, so the government is kind of still making a little money,” Byrne says. “We kind of go by the wayside.” Frustrated landowners are in the heart of Alberta oil country The Byrnes are among a number of landowners that are increasingly frustrated with MAGA Energy in Brazeau and Leduc counties, an area that stretches south of Edmonton and west almost 200 kilometres — a place of industry and commerce that houses an international airport and warehouses, but that drifts into largely agricultural stretches as it moves toward the mountains. Travelling its grid of highways, township and range roads leads from fields to forest, almost all of which is sectioned off, dotted with homes, lives and livelihoods. Neither county is a traditional hotbed of anti–oil and gas activism. Residents have long had relationships with companies that help offset costs with regular lease cheques. Family members work in the oilpatch. Oil and gas is the primary industry in Brazeau, followed by forestry and agriculture, and more than 10,000 wells dot its rural landscape, not to mention thousands of facilities and pipeline segments. In Leduc — home of Leduc No. 1, the well often credited with kicking off Alberta’s oil boom back in 1947 — there are now more than 4,000 wells, hundreds of facilities and thousands of kilometres of pipelines. MAGA has a cluster of hundreds of sites that straddle the two counties where disaffected landowners live. The company’s strategy, like many smaller oil and gas companies, involves buying up older wells, often at a steep discount, in hopes of wringing enough wealth out of the ground before the reservoirs are exhausted. The wells are often cheap to acquire because they come with closure and cleanup liabilities. In Alberta, the relationship between landowners and oil and gas companies runs deep. Property owners can’t refuse companies access to their land, but the companies are expected to compensate them in the form of regular lease cheques. When companies default on their payments, it falls to the province to repay landowners. A since-deleted explanation on MAGA Energy’s homepages, retrieved through the Internet Archive, says the company’s first priority “is to resume production of shut-in wells and develop the by-passed oil and gas potential.” Regulations require the province to assess a company’s financial health before transfers are approved, and prevents transfers when taxes are owed to municipalities. Critics, however, contend those regulations are not always enforced. And as conventional production wanes, areas like Brazeau and Leduc are contending with operators who don’t have the funds or the desire to cover their legal cleanup obligations and lease payments. As of June, MAGA is now restricted from acquiring new licences for failure to pay its mandated annual cleanup quota. “I don’t know how many companies are like MAGA — they’re not the only ones, they can’t be.” Stephenson says.Her land sits off a gravel road, an open space with licks of forest nearby. Two pumpjacks are visible if you walk down the driveway toward the horse corral. Like the Byrnes, her family has been careful. “We’ve just been lucky, and we’ve worked really hard,” she says. Jennifer Stephenson’s family has benefited greatly from the oil and gas industry, but she’s frustrated by MAGA Energy’s lack of payment for its oil operations on her property. Her family has and continues to benefit from oil and gas. Her husband works in the industry and so does her son. Stephenson says the previous owner of the wells, Journey Energy, paid its leases on time aside from a bad stretch during the pandemic, but even then the company’s representative called to explain the situation and settled its outstanding bills quickly. And while she thinks there need to be conversations about weaning society off fossil fuels, she also thinks oil and gas is serving a need and will continue to do so for some time. You can’t just turn off the taps. But she says when MAGA stopped paying, she got mad, not least because there isn’t that communication and respect. Stephenson believes you ought to live up to your obligations. If not, you should be able to take accountability. “We’re not special. It happens a lot,” says Jennifer Stephenson about not receiving owed payments from oil and gas companies. “We’ll get paid through the government, but that gets to be a moot point … because you’re paying me and I’m paying myself.” “It’s right or wrong,” she says when asked what’s motivating her. “There’s black and white.” When an oil and gas company doesn’t pay its leases in Alberta, landowners can apply to the Land and Property Rights Tribunal, the arm’s-length government body, to have the outstanding money paid with tax dollars. In theory, the government then collects that money from the company, but that rarely happens. Since 2010, the government has paid almost $150 million to landowners and has collected $1.4 million back from the companies obligated to cover the lease payments — less than one per cent. The government funds also take months to appear, once landowners go through the tribunal process. Mike Hartfield, the executive director of the tribunal, told The Narwhal average wait times this year are 113 days for uncontested landowner claims and 143 days for contested claims, a sharp decrease from the previous year. He said $27 million has been paid so far for the 2025–26 fiscal year. “We’ll get paid through the government, but that gets to be a moot point at a certain point in time, you know what I mean? Because you’re paying me and I’m paying myself,” Stephenson says of the government using tax dollars to pay landowners. “And I don’t think that many people understand that.” But her concerns go deeper than missing cheques. There are weeds growing in fields, mounting cleanup costs and more. If landowners aren’t compensated by the companies using their land, they can apply to the Land and Property Rights Tribunal to have the money repaid by the provincial government using tax dollars. But the money can take months to appear, leaving owners without recourse for their own mounting costs. “We’re not special, it happens a lot,” she says. “Why is the [Alberta Energy Regulator] allowing these licences to go through?” The Alberta Energy Regulator, which laid off the majority of its communications staff — including media relations — in September, did not answer detailed questions from The Narwhal regarding the transfer of licences and regulatory oversight. It would only provide links to existing regulations and its website.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 Mark Ross, VP of operations for the compnay, who declined to speak on the record prior to reviewing the questions. The next day, Ross contacted The Narwhal and said the company was unable to respond prior to publication time, but would provide answers at a later time. Make Alberta Great Again? MAGA Energy certainly isn’t an outlier, nor is it the norm. There are more than 500,000 licences issued by the regulator to approximately 3,500 companies for pipelines, wells and facilities. The majority of those companies meet minimum expectations, including paying leases to landowners, but also required spending on cleanup. According to the regulator’s annual liability report, 91 per cent of companies were compliant with required spending quotas to shut down old wells, but that means 134 companies did not meet that threshold. Ninety eight companies also didn’t pay their share of the Orphan Well Association levy — an industry-funded organization that cleans up wells with no solvent owner. Companies who don’t meet those obligations are often the same companies unable to pay leases to landowners, taxes to municipalities and cover invoices from contractors. That’s hundreds of millions in unpaid taxes, billions in liabilities and more. While the majority of oil and gas companies pay their leases and meet regulatory expectations, some walk away from their obligations, costing taxpayers and the government millions. The regulator’s own figures show $5.5 billion in environmental liabilities are in the hands of companies that are either in financial distress, or under strain. Estimates for how much it would cost to close and clean up all of Alberta’s oil and gas sites is approximately $38 billion, not including the oilsands. But those estimates are conservative and the regulator itself has said liabilities could exceed $130 billion. Even the companies that do meet those requirements tend to have sizable inventories of inactive wells, which can sit rusting or leaking, sometimes for decades. There are currently more than 150,000 inactive and marginal oil and gas wells across Alberta. Inactive wells have not produced any oil or gas for months (or years). Marginal wells have a very low production. Taken together, they make up more than a third of all the wells in Alberta. Abandoned and marginally productive wells make up a third of all of Alberta’s oil and gas wells — a problem that could cost the government tens of billions of dollars to resolve. In addition, municipalities are owed $254 million in outstanding property taxes from oil and gas companies, while another $200 million has been written off in the past decade, never to be collected. According to the Rural Municipalities of Alberta, more than $100 million of the outstanding taxes are owed by 201 companies that are still operating. As environmental liabilities rise and municipal taxes and leases go unpaid, much of the immediate impact is on landowners. Karl Zajes has been pushing back against those impacts for decades — 47 years to be precise — through his involvement in surface rights groups, advocating for landowners to ensure they get fair treatment if an oil and gas company comes knocking. “Make it honest and sincere to the landowners, instead of taking advantage of them,” he says of his motivation to keep fighting. Zajes is 84 now, but you wouldn’t know it — he’s a short coil of energy who never seems to stand in the same spot for more than a minute. Meeting him in the parking lot of an abandoned restaurant and gas station to start a tour of wells and properties means rolling down your window to say a quick hello before he’s off down the highway, heading to the first stop. It’s the only MAGA site on the tour with pumpjacks bobbing and oil flowing. On his land, just down the road from that first site, an old well pad sits amidst overgrown weeds in an area tucked back from the highway. Zajes says he is owed more than $4,000, but that will double in January when the next payment is due. Karl Zajes, 84, organizes his local surface rights group and advocates for landowners’ claims with oil and gas companies. Standing in his field, he talks of another landowner in the community who showed him a lease from another company for $4,000, with some fine print that said the lease would be reduced to $100 after the first year. “I thought I’d get a copy of it to show people what the oil company landman and sperm have in common — one in three million turns out to be a real human being, the rest are just a bunch of slime,” he says, taking a characteristically fast moment to enjoy his own quip. But the issue is a serious one for Zajes, who’s been organizing increasingly well-attended meetings at the Warburg Community Hall, southeast of MAGA’s regional cluster of sites. Frustration has been boiling over in those meetings, at the current state of regulation and at the government’s latest plans to tackle those failings. “What the government is doing … they want the companies to produce even if they’re not paying you the rent that you’re supposed to get, as long as they’re getting a royalty,” he says. “So it’s, ‘Okay, you go rob the bank, we won’t charge you, you just give us a bit of it.’ ” Anger over Alberta’s ‘stinking pile of shit’ To say the Alberta government relies on the money it gets from oil and gas is an understatement. The provincial budget swings wildly based on the price of oil in particular — a one-dollar change can swing the budget by $750 million. Non-renewable resources accounted for almost 27 per cent of provincial revenue in 2024–25. The untold billions that pour into government coffers represent a power imbalance that is difficult to comprehend. Landowners in Brazeau and Leduc are starting to chafe at the perception that oil and gas companies can break the rules, while residents are expected to abide. Those frustrations boiled over at a recent meeting organized by Zajes, featuring Alberta’s energy minister’s chief of staff, Vitor Marciano, as the invited speaker. Marciano was in Warburg, which sits near the border between the two counties, to pitch the government’s latest plan to deal with a mountain of problems in Alberta’s current oil and gas regulations, including inactive wells, environmental liabilities and companies not paying their share. In a room bristling with resentment, Marciano struggled to connect. At a meeting with landowners in September to review the province’s Mature Asset Strategy, Vitor Marciano, Alberta’s energy minister’s chief of staff, received a chilly welcome. “Let’s be clear, in Alberta the energy companies pay as much taxes in many years as all Albertans combined,” Marciano told the crowd. “They’re the taxpayers too.” Stephenson, who says she is owed money by MAGA for those pumpjacks just up from her horse corral, stood up to confront Marciano about a lease-payment system she says is unfair, too slow and which ultimately uses public dollars to cover private debts. “I’m saying you’re right,” Marciano said after a heated exchange. “I’m also saying that bad companies will be put out of business, and I’ve got to be careful not to say much more than that because I could get in legal trouble. Bad companies will be put out of business and if you’re owed surface payments by MAGA, please file with the Land and Property Rights Tribunal.” Karl Zajes (left) has been organizing regular meetings about oil and gas regulations for local landowners at the Warburg Community Hall. Jennifer Stephenson (right) attended a recent meeting and spoke up against the province’s approach to dealing with delinquent oil and gas companies. The government’s plan, the Mature Asset Strategy, has been controversial since it was first leaked to the media in March. Particularly controversial has been the possibility of creating a government entity — or entities — that would take ownership of aging wells owned by derelict companies. Marciano said those wells would either be transferred to the Orphan Well Association, sold to different private operators to run or be taken over by one of the new organizations to wring whatever wealth is left in the ground, with the goal of funding their cleanup. The report’s author, David Yager, joined Marciano at the meeting and described the current state of oil and gas regulations as a “stinking pile of shit,” an assessment that Marciano and even Premier Danielle Smith agree with. “We’ve got to get the bad actors out of the industry, and that is what we’re trying to solve,” Smith said when asked about Yager’s comments at a news conference in September. “It is a bit of a mess. I’ll use less colourful language. It’s been a mess for a long time.” Critics, however, say the strategy shifts all the risk onto taxpayers. Alberta’s Mature Asset Strategy is met with skepticism Phillip Meintzer has been touring the province talking about what he sees as the risks tied to the Mature Asset Strategy with the Coalition for Responsible Energy, meeting landowners and organizing town halls. He points to the two potential government bodies that would take over aging wells — dubbed ClosureCo and HarvestCo — as two of the greatest concerns, as well as the possibility that more public dollars will be used to clean up the pollution left behind by private companies. “The Mature Asset Strategy is a 50-page document for 21 pretty sweeping recommendations,” he says. “So there’s not a lot of clarity.” Critics of Alberta’s Mature Asset Strategy say it still leaves the burden of old oil and gas wells on the province and taxpayers. The government previously said it has accepted 20 of the recommendations in the strategy, but hasn’t identified which one it rejected. It’s also unclear when any of the recommendations could be put into place, but Marciano told the crowd in Warburg that it could be as early as this fall, and the energy minister’s new mandate letter calls for coordinating the “government-wide implementation” of the strategy. Meintzer says the reception at the meetings has been positive, with landowners concerned about impacts to their land, and curious to learn about the strategy. Turning those concerns into action is another goal of his organization. “The challenge is trying to figure out ways for people to organize, to push back, because a lot of people feel tired, exhausted, beat down,” he says. “Whether it’s the companies on their land, whether it’s the regulator, they just feel exhausted by fighting these battles on an individual level — at the household level or at the property level.” “I think the only way that we can, let’s say, discourage the Government of Alberta from pushing some of this stuff through, is if those who are directly impacted speak up in unison and do it loudly.” ‘How are people going to justify this money coming out of their pockets?’ Before we meet in September, Zajes suggests Saint Francis, Alta., for the start of our tour of MAGA wells. “Do you know it?” he asks over the phone. The meeting spot is more of an intersection than a location, a collection of a few homes east of the crossroads and an old restaurant and gas bar — The Place to Eat — that is shuttered and broken, the ground littered with newspaper pages from 2005. It’s a symbol of how easily a place can be forgotten, or ignored, even if it’s only an hour from the capital. An abandoned restaurant in Saint Francis, Alta., is a symbol of how quickly a once bustling place can fall to disrepair. Some in rural Alberta worry those in the cities aren’t paying enough attention to the problem of old oil and gas infrastructure, a problem that will only get worse. But with Marciano warning the crowd in Warburg that the problem is going to get worse before it gets better, the pain suffered by landowners living off gravel roads could come into focus for more people, including those in the capital. Stephenson doesn’t think enough people understand what’s happening, that the government is helping to pay oil company debts with public funds, after lax regulations allow bad companies to take over licences. “I don’t understand why people in the cities [don’t care about this.] Like, it’s not a problem until it’s a problem for you individually,” she says. “I think if more people knew, and especially going into these next few years and a recession, how are people going to justify this money coming out of their pockets?” The Mature Asset Strategy could only exacerbate that issue, with a lack of clarity around the use of public funds to clean up wells and a proposed insurance program for operators that could be backstopped with public funds. Back at the Byrnes’ property, Dennis has the air of someone who has no interest in the drama. He wants to live out his years in peace and get what’s owed to him. He reluctantly showed up at Zajes’ meeting in September, but left early when tempers flared. He, like Zajes, has had the wells in question on his property since 1982, with various owners prior to MAGA, but he says it’s been about seven or eight years since the last time the well — still outfitted with a newer pumpjack — operated. The oil wells on Dennis Byrne’s property have been there since the early 1980s. He and his wife Barb don’t want to spend their twilight years fighting for money from MAGA Energy. “They came, full crew, pulled the rods, did everything, set it back up, ran it for about a month and it’s never run since,” Byrne says of the site just up from the creek where he might lean against his last tree. Since then, he says the only thing that’s happened is a new sticker was slapped on the fencepost sign with MAGA’s name on it. Byrne wasn’t as involved in fighting oil companies over the wells when they were first drilled decades ago, but others, like Zajes, were. Still are. “Now, here we are again, the same bloody wells,” Byrne says. “We’re fighting them all over again. I mean, it’s literally, it’s been going on that long.” Recent Posts These are the environmental programs to be cut under Carney’s first budget Nov. 5, 2025 11 min. read Prime Minister Mark Carney’s budget scales back rules around greenwashing, and hints an oil and… ‘By the wayside’: rural Albertans are angry at companies not paying their bills Nov. 5, 2025 19 min. read Landowners ring alarm bells about the Alberta government paying them on behalf of delinquent oil… Don’t complain, get paid: Kitimat resident offered thousands from LNG Canada By Matt Simmons (Local Journalism Initiative Reporter) Nov. 4, 2025 3 min. read A leaked contract reveals LNG Canada offered to pay at least one Kitimat resident to…
By the wayside: rural Albertans are angry at companies not paying their bills
