Can someone here confirm or deny the "thousands of capped wells" legend?

[IDemo]

Once again, in a GD thread, I see a familiar post stating that we have all the oil we need in the US but the oil companies have capped off all the wellheads, waiting for much higher prices. I swear I've see this identical post in any number of online forums whenever the subject of oil comes up. Invariably, the individual's father or close friend is a petroleum geologist, or the family simply has many wells on their property.

I know the lower 48 peaked in 1971 or so, but you couldn't tell that to some people. Most of what I have been able to Google on 'capped wells' refers to aging, rusted wells that are nowhere close to being restorable to service. I have found nothing to indicate that it is a standard practice of oil drilling companies to locate a new source and immediately cap it off, much less in the "thousands" of numbers. Not much business sense there.

Just a few examples:

1-does it make more sense to drill new platforms offshore when there's hundreds (if not thousands) of capped wells in Texas already?

2-In the mid-80s...I worked for a air force captain, who had bought 10 capped wells in Texas. They had been proven worthly and profitable...but he simply refused to pump at that price. I asked what price was a acceptable...and he said $50 a barrel, and I just laughed. My guess is that he finally starting to uncap those wells and will clear millions off a very modest investment in the 1980s. He always claimed that his wife's family had hundreds of wells like this...all capped and waiting.

3-Someone once mentioned to me that there are lots of capped wells in Texas that have oil or gas in them but aren't being extracted.

4-There are more capped wells in Texas ready to go quickly then we'll see functioning wells in 15 years of offshore drilling.

[RKP5637]

1. It sounds like another conspiracy theory to me. n/t

[shraby]

2. They are still drilling in the Niagaran Reef in lower

Michigan. Capping some, drilling new. It does happen that new wells are capped but I have no explanation.

[RC]

6. Dry holes.

Not every will is a producer. This might be where the capped wells story originated.

[TheMadMonk]

8. And also wells that might produce, but not be in a position that permits...

...maximum exploitation of the field.

Another souce of the myth could come from the practice of drilling a large number of test wells to map an oil bearing formation. They find oil and are then capped, not to wait for the right time to gouge customers, but because they were only ever drilled to find out where the oil starts and stops.

There's room to scrape a little more profit out of texan oil fields, but nothing there to fuel a new fossil fuel renaisance.

[IDemo]

10. That makes sense

I would imagine such practices have diminished somewhat in the age of 3D seismic imaging.

[Ken Burch]

3. The well-cappers fly in each night in the black helicopters.

:eyes:

[RKP5637]

4. And into the center of the newly formed crop circle and cap the well! n/t

[Arctic Dave]

5. The answer is yes and no.

Yes, oil company do drill and cap wells. Sometimes they do this because the well is not big enough for production, sometimes because they do not have infrastructure to bring it on line.

Are there enough to bring energy independence, no.

[Subdivisions]

7. Thanks for this post. There has already been ample and very profitable

opportunities for these legendary capped wells to have been produced. Oil is $86 per barrel today. That's plenty incentive to bring on that capped oil. Two years ago they could have brough it on the market at $100 to $147 per barrel but it mysteriously never materialized in the midst of spot shortages - even in the U.S.!

[madokie]

9. There are some in our county

and one of the local shyster business men leased some of the land that some are on and when the price of oil was over a hundred bucks a barrel he uncapped a few of them to try to make a buck but it wasn't long until he figured out that the reason they were capped in the first place was because they were marginal at best even at the higher prices oil was selling for then. Ralphie boy took a fucking on that deal but it served him right as he leased the land under false pretenses, said he was going to run cattle on the land but he like me is not a cow man and never bought a single cow He let one of his buddies put a few head on there but the owners of the land figured him out pretty quickly and shut him down.

[TreasonousBastard]

11. Coupla people here got it right...

not only are there a lot of dry wells, but after a while production in decent wells gets down to only a few barrels a day and lose money so they're capped. Uncapping them when prices go up sometimes works, if you can recover the costs of uncapping and working the well.

There are secondary and tertiary methods of squeezing the last drops out of a well, and those seesaw looking pumps are a secondary way that still costs a few bucks to run. Tertiary methods are things like steam injection that still don't get all the oil and are very expensive, and both methods are only used when a field will produce enough to pay.

Somebody saw a dry field somewhere and started the rumor that we've got millions of capped wells just waiting for, well, something. Just like the rumor that back in the Arab shutoff in the 70s there were a thousand tankers waiting just over the horizon for the price to go up.

People are just waiting to believe this kind of stuff-- so much easier to take than reality.

[jpak]

12. Lots of dry exploratory wells are "capped and abandoned"

Texas newspapers used to publish weekly drilling activity reports and most of them were "dusters",

[Ready4Change]

13. There is still a LOT of petroleum out there.

But a lot of it is bound up in forms that require methods other than drilling and pumping. Those methods require an input of energy and more equipment, all of which costs money. Economics is what drives petroleum companies decisions about whether or not to go for those resources. They most likely have it mapped out, at what price point they can start getting a profit from opening each field.

But there are two other important matter beyond mere economics.

The first is the environment. These other petroleum deposits are bound up with other materials. Getting the oil out is an extremely dirty process. Makes processing ME sweet crude seem tidy. Which it isn't, seeing as how we are slitting our throats as it is. (Unless you are a global warming denier.)

The second matter is energy. Getting many of these resources takes so much energy that plans often include building coal, gas or nuclear plants right next to the oil fields. At a certain point you are putting more energy into the process than you recoop by burning the petroleum. At that point the oil is no longer an energy source and is now just an energy carrier, and a dangerously polluting one at that.