Documented Orphaned Oil and Gas Wells Across the United States

[NNadir]

The paper I'll briefly discuss is this one: Documented Orphaned Oil and Gas Wells Across the United States Jade Boutot, Adam S. Peltz, Renee McVay, and Mary Kang Environmental Science & Technology 2022 56 (20), 14228-14236.

From the introductory text:

Orphaned oil and gas wells are a category of unplugged nonproducing wells for which the operator is unknown, unavailable, or insolvent, leaving no responsible party to plug the well and restore the well site other than government agencies and the general public. Orphaned wells can pose a wide range of environmental risks by acting as leakage pathways connecting oil and gas reservoirs to groundwater aquifers and the atmosphere. (1−3) As such, they can be a potential source of groundwater contamination, air pollution, ecosystem degradation, human health impacts, and greenhouse gas emissions, in particular, methane, a potent greenhouse gas. (4−6)

Every year in the United States (U.S.), governments inherit the responsibility to plug and remediate a growing inventory of orphaned wells, for which state funding has been insufficient. (7,8) Therefore, in November 2021, the U.S. federal government committed $4.7 billion through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), to plug documented orphaned oil and gas wells and remediate and restore well sites across the country. However, there is currently a shortfall of available information to quantify and maximize the environmental benefits of plugging.
The definition of documented orphaned wells is important for the determination of the wells that are eligible for plugging and remediation through the IIJA funding. Orphaned oil and gas wells are a subcategory of unplugged abandoned oil and gas wells. In the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas inventory, abandoned wells are defined as unplugged or plugged wells with no recent production. (9) The main difference between an abandoned and an orphaned well is that an orphaned well has no responsible operator, leaving the financial responsibility to plug and remediate the wells to states, other government agencies, and the general public (Table 1). In addition, an orphaned well can have the meaning or term used by a state to describe a well in need of plugging, remediation, or reclamation. Only “documented” orphaned wells will be addressed through the IIJA. In general, a documented orphaned well is a well that is documented in state databases and that has gone through some internal state verification process to determine the well as being orphaned. However, these verification processes vary substantially among states, creating inconsistencies in documented orphaned well definitions across the U.S. On the other hand, the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission (IOGCC) refers to an “undocumented orphaned well” as a well that is typically unknown to the state or a well that requires further verification to determine the well as being orphaned. (10)

Although oil and gas well locations and some attributes are recorded in state databases, orphaned well definitions and statuses, as well as the content of the well databases, vary widely among states, making it challenging to compile a national orphaned well data set. As of June 2022, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) identified 117,672 documented orphaned oil and gas wells across 27 states in the U.S. (11) Although the data set contains well type (e.g., oil, gas, or combined oil and gas) and geographic location information, well type data is only available for 49% of the documented orphaned wells, and the data set does not provide other well attributes such as well depth or the date on which the well last produced (or “last production date”). Moreover, the dates for each state vary substantially from July 2019 to June 2022 and are not well suited to analyze temporal variations. Other recent efforts to document the number of orphaned wells in the U.S. have relied on state survey responses and state databases that are unmapped. The IOGCC places the total number of documented orphaned wells in the U.S. to be 92,198 as of December 31st, 2020 and 131,227 as of November 15th, 2021. (10) Despite the 40% increase in orphaned well numbers in the order of months, no additional information is provided on orphaned well attributes (e.g., geographic location, well type, well depth, or last production date). However, the IOGCC provides high level explanations behind the increase in documented orphaned well numbers for a few states (Table S1)...

Note that from the abstract, this is only known wells. The known wells are thought to be a fraction of the total wells.

Some graphics:




The caption:

Figure 1. Distribution of documented orphaned oil and gas wells across the U.S. based on state databases as of April 2022 (left) and September 2021 (right).

The caption:

Figure 2. Total annual methane emissions by scenarios developed in Williams et al. (6) with methane emissions and emissions uncertainty for abandoned wells by the U.S. EPA (9) (top) and distribution of annual methane emissions by state for the average of all five scenarios (bottom). All emission scenarios are described in Table S8.

The caption:

Figure 3. Well attribute availability for the 81,857 documented orphaned oil and gas wells as of September 2021 (top); availability of well type, well depth, and last production date per state (left column); pie chart of well type distribution (top right column); cumulative distribution of well depth (middle right column); histogram of last production date (bottom right column).

The caption:

Figure 4. Orphaned dates by year (left column) and month (right column) for documented orphaned oil and gas wells in Texas, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming with available orphaned date information as of September 2021. Years/months indicating no wells orphaned are years/months with no available data.

When I was a kid, we used to drive to antinuclear protests on the theory that so called "nuclear waste lasts forever." This activity was a demonstration of the power of hysteria, lies, selective attention, and frankly abysmal ignorance.

What we were doing back then was the equivalent of spending millions of dollars to discuss Hunter Bidens laptop while declaring Jared Kushner's two billion dollar bribe paid by an oil nation as a non-issue.

This type of ignorance is still active today, well more than decades since I educated myself and realized that being an antinuke, carrying on about events like Chernobyl which on scale are trivial or pretending that dogma about so called "nuclear waste" simply demonstrated a poor education on energy and environmental issues.

While we were carrying about barely conceivable risks to some putative rancher in Nevada in the 25th century, in the 20th century, millions of people were dying each year from dangerous fossil fuel waste, aka "air pollution."

And the wells were being opened, producing, run out and then abandoned, so we could drive.

This is what we left for the future world.

I trust you're enjoying your weekend.

[GreenWave]

1. Gulf of Mexico is flooded with such orphan wells.

And to think that the GOP routinely gives these tax dodging mega wealthy oil companies billions of tax payer dollars annually which they do not need and this is how oil companies repay us by expecting us to clean up their poopie diapers at taxpayer expense.

What don't we do for them?
Fight wars for them? Check
Let them delay alternative energy? Check
Frack? Check
Destroy environment? Check

[gab13by13]

2. Central Pa. has to have a lot more.

I came across one while hunting, spewing ooze that would eventually make it to a nearby creek, I assume.

There must be millions of uncapped wells.

[NNadir]

4. The authors seem to recognize this, as noted in the paper's abstract. It's tragic...

...the real issue will be groundwater. It already is in many places.