The Alberta Energy Regulator has suspended the operations of beleaguered oil and gas company MAGA Energy for a raft of failures, including unpaid taxes, unpaid fees, improper care and closure of wells and failure to clean up spills. 

Last fall an investigation from The Narwhal revealed the scope of the company’s issues, from its failure to pay landowners for wells on their land to significant tax arrears it owes municipalities. 

The violations also highlighted failures at the Alberta Energy Regulator, which The Narwhal found approved the transfer of hundreds of wells and related infrastructure to the company in September 2024, when MAGA Energy owed more than $20,000 in taxes. This move was in violation of a ministerial order barring such transfers. 

Before the transfer, The Narwhal learned the company had already been describing itself as “in survival mode.”

The regulator told The Narwhal in November last year the company “met the requirements to proceed” with the transfer, but refused to answer questions when provided evidence that it was in violation of the rules. 

The suspension order notes the regulator was aware MAGA Energy had “outstanding debts to municipalities” and that it imposed extra oversight “which requires that applications regarding well licence transfers or new well applications … be reviewed through a non-standard process.”

The order suspending MAGA’s operations outlines a lengthy series of contraventions, including failed inspections, improper or non-existent remediation of contaminated land, failure to pay the Orphan Well Association levy, failure to pay municipal taxes, failure to pay minimum amounts for cleanup and a financial situation the regulator says has only gotten worse. 

The regulator said based on the long list of contraventions that it “believes that it is necessary to suspend MAGA’s wells, facilities and pipelines in order to protect the public or the environment.”

MAGA Energy now has 14 days to suspend its wells, pipelines and facilities, pay its outstanding orphan levy and provide a security deposit for its failure to safely seal the required portion of its wells. 

It has 30 days to submit a clean-up plan for contaminated sites and to begin that work, as well as to submit detailed plans to bring inactive wells into regulatory compliance and resolve all outstanding inspection failures. 

MAGA Energy is also required to provide detailed progress reports to the regulator every month. The company can only restart operations if it fulfills all of the regulator’s demands and then only at the discretion of the regulator.

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The Alberta Energy Regulator appears to have ignored a direct ministerial order meant to protect rural municipalities and prevent struggling oil and gas companies from obtaining new licences, data obtained by The Narwhal reveals.

At issue is a transfer of 170 oil and gas wells, 30 related facilities and 47 pipeline licences to Calgary-based MAGA Energy in September 2024 despite the company owing unpaid taxes to Sturgeon County, just north of Edmonton. 

A ministerial order, first signed in 2023, prevents the regulator from approving the transfer of licences to any company owing more than $20,000 in unpaid taxes unless there’s a payment plan in place. 

Data obtained by The Narwhal shows MAGA Energy owed more than $200,000 in taxes to Sturgeon County at the time of the transfer — more than 10 times the limit. The county told The Narwhal MAGA Energy violated an agreement to repay a portion of those taxes owing from 2023, and that it alerted the regulator in March 2024 that MAGA Energy was non-compliant.

The regulator touts its power to approve licence transfers as a primary tool for weeding out bad actors in the oilpatch and says indications of financial difficulties, including tax arrears, will trigger a deep dive into a company seeking licences. 

Critics say the MAGA transfer is just one example of a far bigger problem.

“Every time I hear the Alberta Energy Regulator say, ‘This transfer process is the backbone of our liability management system,’ I mean, I almost throw up my breakfast,” Shaun Fluker says. A law professor and head of public law clinic at the University of Calgary, Fluker’s “seen nothing to back up that statement, and what you uncovered here is really just a very quantifiable illustration of that.”

Alberta Energy Regulator in ‘direct violation’ of its rules: lawyer

The Alberta Energy Regulator refused to answer questions regarding the MAGA transfer and the figures obtained by The Narwhal. 

The office of Alberta’s energy minister, Brian Jean, did not respond to emailed questions, neither did MAGA Energy.

In response to earlier questions for a previous story about MAGA Energy, it said the company “met the requirements to proceed” with the transfer and that “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.”

When emailed a series of questions and asked how the company could meet the requirements to proceed with the transfer given the evidence from Sturgeon County, the regulator declined to answer. 

“Please refer to previous statements, we have no further statements on this topic,” read an email signed “AER media.”

Fluker, who has represented landowners in court over oil and gas licences and has extensive experience researching energy regulations in Alberta, says the lack of an agreement over its tax arrears with Sturgeon County would represent a “direct violation” of the minister’s order.

He says even if, hypothetically, MAGA Energy presented false information to the regulator — the “evidence” cited in the regulator’s response to questions — the regulator would still bear the blame. 

“Even if MAGA did lie to the Alberta Energy Regulator, they had the information from the municipality,” he says. 

“They have to be better than accepting false claims from applicants or transferors. … I think we legitimately expect them to be able to overcome that. That’s the whole point of being a regulatory agency.”

After publication, Fluker added the following additional statement: He has seen no evidence that MAGA Energy lied to the Alberta Energy Regulator but that it seems from what information is now publicly available that either MAGA submitted incomplete or inaccurate information to the regulator — or the regulator failed to act on accurate information provided by MAGA in relation to its unpaid municipal taxes. “Either way, the fact that the Alberta Energy Regulatory refuses to disclose evidence submitted by MAGA to clarify the situation is highly problematic and leads to discussions in hypotheticals and speculation,” he wrote in an email.

Fluker is skeptical the regulator undertakes the due diligence it professes when it comes to regulatory oversight and licensee evaluations.

‘It is an absolute free-for-all’ says Sturgeon County of regulatory failure

Obtaining tax information for oil and gas companies is a difficult, and expensive, task. Municipalities do not openly share details on which companies are in arrears and how much they owe. 

Sturgeon County did admit MAGA Energy owed more than the ministerial order allowed. It previously told The Narwhal that the county alerted the regulator that the company was non-compliant with its obligations. But to determine the exact amounts required a trip to the county — as tax data can only be accessed by visiting the physical office — and paying the $1,000 required to release the data. 

That data from county tax rolls shows MAGA Energy owed just over $100,000 in taxes and penalties for 2023, an additional $90,000 in 2024 and $116,000 more in 2025. 

But Sturgeon County said the figure it reported to the regulator on March 15, 2024, was slightly higher, at $171,000 owing. A spokesperson confirmed MAGA Energy breached its agreement with the county in February 2024. 

The county’s openness is in contrast to municipalities that are reluctant to provide even basic information. Many of those other counties are smaller and more dependent on oil and gas producers. 

“For us, this particular company not paying its taxes is not going to break us,” Sturgeon County mayor Alanna Hnatiw says.

Still, it is a pressing issue across the province and has a significant impact on the ability of smaller counties to pay for services such as roads and wastewater treatment, Hnatiw says, adding it undermines faith in the government, regulator and industry. 

“If we can’t have trust that we know how to make regulations that serve and protect people, and uphold those regulations, then it is an absolute free-for-all,” she says. “And I don’t think any Albertan is really comfortable, or any Canadian for that matter, is comfortable with the idea of a free-for-all in the energy sector or in any other sector.”

Hnatiw is a strong supporter of the oil and gas industry and believes the vast majority of companies follow the rules and act responsibly, but she says the regulator, and the government which gives it direction, have allowed problem companies to act with impunity.

“The Alberta Energy Regulator has to get serious about how to deal with these businesses, because they are running without consequence, and they know that,” she says. 

“These companies do know how to thread the needle right enough to keep running without paying their way.”

In the specific case of licence transfers, Hnatiw questions why there is a process for alerting the regulator to delinquencies if that information is going to be ignored.

Across Alberta, hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid taxes from oil and gas companies

MAGA Energy now owes more than $300,000 to Sturgeon County as 2025 comes to close, but it’s just one of hundreds of oil and gas companies across the province that are impacting the ability of rural municipalities to operate. 

Across the province, companies owe more than $254 million in unpaid taxes and municipalities have written off an additional $200 million, money that will never be recovered. 

The Rural Municipalities of Alberta says $100 million of the remaining taxes are owed by 201 companies that are still operating.

Hnatiw says that’s particularly egregious. 

“I think there’s a difference if you have a company that is defunct and is basically in a period of stasis, than somebody who is still using your roads, using your infrastructure and requiring the maintenance to be able to deal with their wear and tear on roads,” she says.

She also takes issue with a provincial government that doesn’t appear to be taking action while downloading the consequences to municipalities. 

At the recent Rural Municipalities of Alberta convention, she says Alberta Premier Danielle Smith told attendees that those millions in unpaid taxes are unlikely to ever be collected. (Smith’s office did not respond to a request for comment about this by publication time.)

“To hear that and to not hear the next sentence about what we’re doing to shut down these companies doesn’t give me a lot of confidence that these companies are going to see any consequences,” she says.

— With files from Kelsie Johnston

Updated on Dec. 11, 2025, at 2:08 p.m MT: This story has been updated to include an additional statement from Shaun Fluker.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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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.

“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.

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. 

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. 

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.

“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.  

“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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.”

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.

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.

“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.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.