At the beginning of the 20th century, the area that came to be known as Foothills County, Alberta, was largely agricultural – the result of an already established settler colonial process on Treaty 7 lands. In 1914, rancher William Stewart Herron noted patches of gas along the Sheep River. He purchased the land in question and financed drilling. With an investment from Archibald Dingman, Calgary Petroleum Products was formed and Alberta’s first oil well began the province’s oil boom.

Patterns of population growth and decline in this region were largely determined by the petroleum industry in the 20th and 21st centuries. Well sites multiplied, emptied out and were abandoned over multiple boom and bust cycles. In the early 1990s, the Orphan Well Association (OWA) was founded to reclaim and return abandoned sites to their natural state. Like many areas of Alberta, Foothills County is a contradictory place: it is simultaneously supportive of developing oil and gas industry, yet also wary of the environmental damage left behind when extraction ends.

Today, Foothills County is the site of a new energy boom, with renewables projects rapidly multiplying across the landscape. With wind and solar projects rapidly multiplying, communities in the Foothills are reforming relationships to the (successive) cycles of energy industry.

Boom Bust Repeat attempts to understand how the residents and communities of Foothills County relate to their energy pasts, presents and futures.