Alberta has a fund for this exact purpose: to remediate & reclaim wells that may be 50+ years old where the owner no longer exists. Companies fund it on the front-end.
Even after recognizing the potential problem of abandonned wells the fund is massively underfunded; I can't imagine what land owners must be going through that don't have any protection. One difference: in our jurisidiction they usually only own the land rights (vs. subsurface mineral) so the leases paid are for access and generally pretty small. this article doesn't get into the weeds but I wonder if the US owners have mineral rights (based on the mention of royalty share) and thus the responsibility for Rec & Rem is more complicated.
Other provinces have funds as well, and the federal government just allocated a couple billion to the programs in Alberta, BC, and Saskatchewan, as part of the COVID response. My employer's already gotten some extra subcontracting work out of those programs.
Mineral rights are a mishmash depending on where you are. If for places without known or probable oil afaik land generally comes with the mineral rights attached. In other places where there's actual money to be made in it the mineral rights are more likely to have been separated from the land rights at some point.
Even after recognizing the potential problem of abandonned wells the fund is massively underfunded; I can't imagine what land owners must be going through that don't have any protection. One difference: in our jurisidiction they usually only own the land rights (vs. subsurface mineral) so the leases paid are for access and generally pretty small. this article doesn't get into the weeds but I wonder if the US owners have mineral rights (based on the mention of royalty share) and thus the responsibility for Rec & Rem is more complicated.