Originally published Nov. 5. 2025 at The Narwhal. Read the full story here.

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.”