Plug and Abandonment Trends in Albertan Gas Wells
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Alberta is known to be a significant oil & gas producer with over 468,000 wells drilled in the province since the beginning of the twentieth century. While the majority of these wells were drilled to produce oil, approximately 165,000 gas wells can be found in Alberta and are studied here. This represents a more than six-fold increase over Alberta’s western neighbor, British Columbia, which is known to be a primarily gas producing province. Over 80% of the gas wells in Alberta have yet to enter the abandonment stage. A growing stock of suspended wells can be found in the province which comes with an increase in liability for all parties involved i.e., the operators, the provincial regulator and the Orphan Well Association (OWA). Here we analyze abandonment trends in Alberta, showing that combining the growing suspended well stock with the shorter lifetime associated with the horizontal gas wells currently being drilled in the province, we can expect a wave of well abandonments in the coming decades. We focus only on gas wells, where we can make a comparison with a similar study previously conducted for wells in British Columbia.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".