Clean-up of leaking, abandoned oil wells finally under way
Some 9 million Americans live within a kilometre of environmentally unsafe orphaned pumpjacks
Bill Suan bought his family’s cattle farm in the mountains of West Virginia 15 years ago with little thought for the two gas wells drilled on the property – but then they started leaking oil onto his fields and sickening his cows.
After taking the operator to court, Suan was successful in plugging one well, but the company has since disappeared, leaving him with a small-scale environmental disaster that is a symptom of the larger problem of orphaned oil wells across the United States.
“It’s shocking to think that it was like that for decades,” Suan said.
From rural areas in the east where modern oil production began to cities in southern California, where pumpjacks loom not far from homes, the US is pockmarked with perhaps millions of unsealed oil wells that have not produced in decades, and sometimes do not have an identifiable owner.
After lax regulation and the petroleum industry’s booms and busts, many states have struggled to deal with these wells, which can leak oil and brine into water supplies and emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
In a first, Washington is making a concerted effort to plug these wells through a US$4.7 billion fund, passed as part of an overhaul of US infrastructure.
“The money available to the states [has] never been commensurate to the scale of the problem, and now for the first time it will be,” said Adam Peltz, a senior lawyer at the Environmental Defense Fund non-profit.
It is likely the funds will not be enough to solve the problem entirely, and environmentalists warn that the patchwork of state laws governing oil production include many loopholes that could allow companies to continue abandoning wells.
Since the first commercial barrel of oil was extracted in Pennsylvania in 1859, the US has been at the centre of global petroleum production.
But in many states, it took more than a century to pass regulations governing record-keeping for wells and their sealing, or plugging.
Today, the exact number of abandoned wells nationwide is unknown, but the Environmental Protection Agency this year estimated it to be about 3.5 million. The EDF estimates some 9 million Americans live within 1km of a well that is considered orphaned.
In southern California’s Kern county, the Central California Environmental Justice Network has received reports of abandoned petroleum infrastructure leaking oil next to schools and homes.
“A lot of the infrastructure that was built, that was now abandoned … is very much centred around poor communities,” said Gustavo Aguirre Jnr, the network’s director in the county.
California plugs a few dozen per year, according to the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission (IOGCC), and is in the process of sealing 56 near the city of Santa Clarita, just north of Los Angeles, some of which date back to 1949.
Most of America’s orphaned wells are thought to be in eastern states, and it is not unheard of for landowners to find a hole in the ground or a pipe protruding from the earth that leaks oil or brine.
Pennsylvania, which is thought to have the most, plugged 18 orphaned wells in 2020, according to the IOGCC. In the same year, West Virginia, which has thousands of documented orphaned wells, plugged one.
“It’s been decades of neglect, just letting them get away with it, not forcing the plugging regulations,” said Suan, who has had to fence off the unplugged well on his land to keep cattle from getting into the leaked oil.
“And now we’re stuck with all of them.”
The federal infrastructure bill Congress approved last year will likely allow many of these wells to be sealed, according to Ted Boettner, a senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute, which studies energy in the region where oil production began.
However, he said in some states there were not enough inspectors or financial requirements to keep drillers from walking away from their wells.
A McGill University study published last year ranked abandoned wells as the 10th greatest methane emitter in the US, well below industries such as beef and natural gas production.
But with President Joe Biden’s administration trying to curb the country’s emissions where it can, and as estimates of future damage by climate change grow increasingly dire, Peltz characterised the plugging investment as a start.
“If we have to give every slice of the pie, which we do, we have to get this slice of the pie,” he said.
A lot of the [oil] infrastructure that was built ... is centred around poor communities
GUSTAVO AGUIRRE JNR