Historian David Finch, whose research focused on the oil industry in Western Canada, said that Alberta experienced three significant downturns in the oil industry since it first became commercially viable—the first in the 1960s; the second in the 1980s, and the third that started with the collapse of global oil prices in 2014. Crude oil prices dropped to near ten-year low prices. There were concerns that nearly a third of oil companies could go bankrupt. It was the longest oil price decline since the 1980s. That downturn resulted in what the CBC described in 2019 as a "tsunami" of orphaned oil and gas wells. By 2017, there were "3,127 wells that need[ed] to be plugged or abandoned, and a further 1,553 sites that have been abandoned but still need[ed] to be reclaimed".
