Groups go on hunt for abandoned oil wells

Infrastructure law gives $4.7B to plugging sites, which cause environmental contaminants

A century after oil barons scoured Texas for prime plots from which to extract black gold, another boom is underway: the plugging of thousands of abandoned oil wells. It’s an oil rush in reverse, spurred by federal money.

In 2021, President Joe Biden signed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which released $4.7 billion to states and federal agencies for plugging fallow oil and gas projects known as “orphan wells” if they lacked an owner.

“There has never been federal money made available to plug these wells,” said Adam Peltz, a lawyer with the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group.

Each leaky well could pose a grave environmental danger to surrounding areas in the form of a methane plume or groundwater contamination. Yet closing a single orphan well can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

One federal agency that is beginning to resolve this problem is the National Park Service, which has started using the funding to build a four-member team of orphan-well detectives. Its mandate is to track down the dirtiest orphan wells on more than 84 million acres of federal lands the agency oversees and plug them — which had previously been a pipe dream.

In January, the service’s inaugural project began: to plug 10 wells spread throughout a labyrinth of bayou canals in Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve in southern Louisiana.

The work is expensive. Forrest Smith, a petroleum and environmental engineer at the agency, estimates each well in this park will cost about $100,000 to close. With $9.8 million in funding for current projects — pulled from the billions allocated broadly to state governments and federal agencies — and millions more on the way, his team is eyeing several dozen more wells across the country for closure. It’s the first dent in a list of about 2,000 wells on the federal lands under the stewardship of the park service.

The grand tally of U.S. wells that have been abandoned or that do not have an owner is propagating like an algae bloom. In 2018, the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission recorded just over 60,000 orphan wells nationwide. By 2021, that number had surpassed 130,000.

And that’s probably nowhere near the true total. The interstate commission estimates there may be 800,000 undocumented orphan wells. “There’s still this huge uncertainty,” said Mary Kang, a professor at McGill University who monitors the efforts to assess to quantify orphan wells.

Beyond confirming a well’s existence, databases typically provide little additional information. That’s when the detective work begins. Clues may emerge in the shape of battery tanks or drilling pads captured with satellite imaging. For one mysterious well in the Hoh Rain Forest on the northwestern tip of Washington state, a random post on an online hiking forum provided the team with a specific location.

Next, an inspector ventures out with a metal detector, a gas sniffer and a list of questions: Where is the well, exactly? Is it plugged? Is it causing environmental damage? Could a hiker bump into it?

With any luck, the agency will find an owner able to afford the costs of plugging a well. But often, that’s not the case.