Landowners and legal experts say Alberta's hastily passed bill to help clean up the province's huge stockpile of abandoned energy facilities harms property rights without addressing why the problem exists in the first place.

A group tasked with cleaning up Alberta's thousands of abandoned energy facilities says the province's rules to make sure polluters clean up their wells before selling them off are inadequate.

The Supreme Court of Canada says the trustee for a bankrupt Alberta energy company cannot simply walk away from unprofitable wells on agricultural land without having to clean up.

The Alberta Energy Regulator says the province's Orphan Well Association (OWA) will look after an apparent leak at an oil and gas handling facility owned by Insch Commodity Ltd.

The Supreme Court of Canada will hear an appeal from Alberta's energy regulator that seeks to overturn a ruling that could allow bankrupt energy companies to walk away from cleaning up abandoned oil wells.

There are a startling number of wells that are now orphaned after a Calgary company was forced into receivership.

Legislation has been introduced to allow the province to lend $235 million to the Orphan Well Association.

The Alberta Energy Regulator said Friday it will appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada a case that pits creditors' rights to oil and gas assets against environmental liabilities.

According to the regulator, Lexin has failed to comply with multiple orders and doesn't have enough staff to manage its more than 1,600 sites.

There are over 50,000 abandoned well sites in Alberta, no longer in production, that need to be restored and cleaned up according to 2014 numbers provided by Alberta Environment and Parks.