Orphaned wells, oil assets, and debt: the competing ethics of value creation and care within petrocapitalist projects of return
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This essay explores the phenomenon known as ‘orphaned wells’, meaning unprofitable oil and gas wells (‘legacy wells’) that have become disentangled from their corporate owners owing to insolvency, or owing to a failure to comply with local regulations. Drawing from an ethnographic example of a near‐insolvent oil and gas corporation in Alberta, Canada, and its strategies of refinancing, the essay explores how value creation and the moral force of the obligation to create a financial return give rise to a ‘durational ethics’ that shapes corporate and financial performativities and prolongs the ‘life’ of legacy oil and gas assets. Legacy assets, understood as potential orphans, are thus caught up in a lively corporate practice of asset circulation and recombination often deployed by producers for the moral work of ‘cleaning balance sheets’. This essay calls for ‘thinking with orphans’ to recognize the competing ethical registers which produce them in addition to the growing need for responsibility and corporate care for legacy oil and gas assets.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.078 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".