End-of-life obligations are often scoped early through EIA, permitting, and development planning. However, over a 15–30-year producing life, closeout execution can drift from the original assumptions and become dominated by operational timing, cost constraints, and evolving regulatory expectations once production stops. In today’s context of climate commitments, water stress, community expectations, and emerging low-carbon subsurface uses such as CO2 storage, hydrogen storage, geothermal development, and monitoring networks, “after production” has become a long-horizon stewardship challenge.

This special session will explore how operators, regulators, technical experts, and sustainability leaders are reframing end-of-life from a narrow technical endpoint into an integrated stewardship plan. The discussion will focus on how methane risk, water protection, and subsurface reuse potential can be assessed, prioritized, funded, and communicated transparently at both well and basin scales. Well integrity and abandonment execution will be discussed as essential delivery mechanisms, but the primary focus will be on the broader stewardship outcomes and governance frameworks that determine whether post-production decisions are climate-aligned, socially durable, and fit for a sustainable energy system.