How old are you, Rockdoc? Remember Dome Petroleum? They accumulated huge acreage in northern Canada expecting it to feed LNG export projects in the 1980s. Major bankruptcy.
I was working in the industry when that was all going on...the company I worked for at the time was a member of one of the consortia drilling in the Arctic. Calgary was a crazy place to be working at the time...downtown bars were full on a Friday evening and "three martini lunches" were commonplace at the Petroleum club.
There were a lot of moving parts to the industry at the time and the Dome story is a bit complicated. Dome had completed a lot of takeovers in the early eighties besides their activities in the Beaufort Sea and elsewhere. They were still a going concern but with lots of debt mainly due to acquisitions and then when the oil price collapsed in the mid-eighties they couldn't cover debts and there was nobody to buy the assets they would have liked to spin off. As a consequence Amoco rolled in and bought them out in the late eighties.
The story then isn't much different for a number of players today. Invested heavily during the heady days of high prices, over extended credit limits and then when prices dropped there were few options available in terms of selling assets of farming out interest in order to stay above water. That story has been shaking itself out for the last year and probably won't be done for some time.