Ohio makes slow progress in capping as many as 100K dangerous abandoned oil and gas wells
Dennis and Vicky Moore waited 16 years for Ohio to properly cap the abandoned oil wells on their Carroll County property.
Rusty pipes, pump jacks and cables were scattered through the woods on the Moores’ 160 acres.
“You could smell the oil that was still in the ground and had seeped up .... ,” Vicky Moore said. “The company that had the wells here, they went out of business and they just left everything here. They didn’t care. They pretty much said ‘tough. It’s your headache.’ ”
The couple worried about oil seeping into their drinking water, a sinkhole appearing or a leak that could have forced them to evacuate.
Once the epicenter of America’s oil and gas exploration, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources estimates that the state has at least 36,000 — but potentially 100,000 — abandoned oil and gas wells that could put landowners and the public at risk.
And the cost to plug them isn’t cheap.
The Moores couldn’t afford to “decommission” them on their own. Instead, the Moores had to live with an oil “graveyard” until 2021 when the Ohio Department of Natural Resources spent $522,000 from its orphan well program fund to haul the old equipment away and seal their wells with concrete.
“We are going to plug as many wells as we can with the money that we have,” said Eric Vendel, Ohio Department of Natural Resources oil and gas resources division chief.
But with a list of at least 36,000 abandoned wells and a $25 million budget covering 227 projects in 2022, the wait for many Ohioans could be a lot longer than 16 years.
Many abandoned wells date to 1800s
The Ohio River Basin was a major oil producer in the 1800s, and people hoping to strike it rich drilled more than 250,000 wells.
Most of those went into the ground before 1910, when prospectors didn’t need permits and no state laws existed on spacing them from one another. City homeowners could have their own personal-use wells in their backyards.
When those wells stopped producing, “literally what you did is you dug down 6 feet below the surface, cut the well casing and plugged it with a log,” said Dale Arnold, the director of energy, utility and local government policy for the Ohio Farm Bureau.
Or you plugged it with clay, old tools, broken furniture, cannon balls or whatever you had lying around. “We pulled blue jeans out once,” orphan well program engineer Jason Simmerman said.
That’s a problem because trees rot, tools rust, and then the oil or gas leaks.
In the last decade, Admiral King Elementary School in Lorain County closed for weeks because of a gas leak from an orphan well under its gym. A Stark County farmer had natural gas in his water.
A landside at a well site in Noble County closed a township road and threatened Big Run Creek. Gas and chlorides leaked into residential yards in Yorkville, a village that straddles Belmont and Jefferson counties.
And a well in Noble County released “multiple barrels of fluid per minute into the environment,” according to ODNR’S 2021 orphan well program report.
“What we’re finding out is thousands of these orphaned wells are leaking,” Ted Boettner, a senior researcher at the Ohio Valley River Institute, said. “Some of the volatile organic compounds (like methane) pose serious public safety concerns.”
Orphan wells hidden hazards in urban areas
Orphan wells have been found in 58 of Ohio’s 88 counties, including Franklin, Cuyahoga and Summit, where three major cities exist (Columbus, Cleveland and Akron).
“Folks in the eastern suburbs of Cleveland bought property with a pipe sticking up and were told, ‘Congratulations, you have an orphan well on your property,’” Arnold said.
Those are typically personal-use wells drilled by previous homeowners, but Arnold suspects Stark and Summit counties have dozens (and potentially hundreds) of old commercial wells underneath suburbs that “didn’t exist back then.”
He estimated that 100 orphan wells were capped in Cuyahoga Valley National Park.
“These wells are in urban areas,” Vendel said. “They are in places you wouldn’t expect.”
He and Simmerman have vented old wells up a flag pole at a high school football stadium and 6 inches from the porch of a newly constructed home in Buckeye Lake.
More money, more wells uncovered
Finding these hidden hazards is getting easier.
The state started flying drones with special equipment that scans for changes in the ground’s magnetic field.
These airborne magnetometers can signal the presence of buried well casings a lot faster than an individual walking across a field.
A drone flown over Eagle Twp. in Hancock County found nearly 90 wells in an area with historical records for 39.
In total, the program has 1,030 orphan wells on its official list and another 36,000 known wells waiting to be verified.
“That’s what we have decent records for, but we think we have more than that,” Simmerman said.
At the current rate of decommissioning of about 220 wells per year, Ohioans could be waiting until 2502 for the last abandoned line to be mapped and capped.
“What you have to keep in mind is prior to like 2010 the whole (orphan well) program was 35 people on a shoestring budget,” Vendel said.
Another major bump in funding came in 2018 when state lawmakers dedicated 30% of the state’s oil and gas severance taxes to the program. That’s why the program plugged 15 wells in 2017 but was able to fix 83 the following year.
The federal government also awarded Ohio $25 million Thursday from the Biden administration’s new infrastructure law.
The money should plug between 170 and 320 documented wells, but how long that takes will depend on how many certified companies are available to do the work.
ODNR contracted to plug 220 wells in fiscal year 2022, but 70 of those projects weren’t completed. “The contractors just weren’t able to plug that many in a given year,” Vendel said.
And that’s the big issue: There simply aren’t enough qualified contractors bidding on Ohio’s capping projects. The state has authorized more than 40 companies to do the work, but Vendel said he is routinely signing off on a dozen different vendors.
He wasn’t sure why the other companies aren’t bidding, but the jobs are complex and the bids final. It takes a certain amount of “art and expertise” to know how much one will cost, he said.
“We are trying to recruit more companies here in Ohio,” Arnold said. “The business opportunity is very much here.”