Oil is Bankrupt (If We Want It)

Alberta’s Oil Companies Are the Walking Dead.

6 min readSep 25, 2022

This figure shows how Alberta’s let-the-future-pay-for-cleanup funding model is playing out. The red curve shows the growth of cleanup liabilities, which accumulate as new wells are drilled and not cleaned up. The blue curve shows the assets that will pay for this cleanup — the industry’s future income (assuming various prices of oil and gas).

Albert’s oil-patch is a zombie, the walking dead. The companies that extract oil there owe more money than they can pay, more than they can borrow, more than they can earn. If they were made to pay their lawful debts, they would all go bankrupt, and, in so doing, would end the extraction of one of the dirtiest, worst sources of oil…

Oil is Bankrupt (If We Want It)

Alberta’s Oil Companies Are the Walking Dead.

Written by Cory Doctorow