This article explores the entanglement of petroleum geology and finance with the identification and qualification of tight oil prospects in Alberta. Tracing the corporate history of an entrepreneurial energy corporation on the verge of liquidation, the article explores the calculative agencies and forms of subsurface qualification that matter to making or losing money. Specifically, it illustrates how a financialized geology navigates the sedimented spaces of industry, mapping the very pore spaces of subterranean rock by using big data and other prosthetic devices, such as well logs, in the pursuit of shareholder value. Drawing from science and technology studies perspectives on the performativity of financial models, and connecting those to the emerging anthropological interest in “resource materiality,” (Richardson et al. 2014) this article ethnographically foregrounds how finance shapes discoveries and formats them into the framework of finance, particularly the formulas of “net present value” and “discounted future cash flows,” which are constitutive of shareholder value, corporate profit, and hydrocarbon futures. The article argues that more anthropological attention needs to be given to how these formulas and their fictions work to materialize a financial path dependency on future hydrocarbon liquidation.

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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