Environmental risks and opportunities of orphaned oil and gas wells
Towards a framework for managing millions of abandoned oil and gas wells


Date:
June 20, 2023
Source:
McGill University
Summary:
Researchers are leading an international team whose goal is to
create a framework to help governments in the U.S. and around the
world assess and prioritize remediation strategies for orphaned
oil and gas wells. These inactive wells represent environmental
risks since they have the potential to contaminate water supplies,
degrade ecosystems, and emit methane and other air pollutants that
are harmful to human health. But plugging the wells also offers
various potential environmental opportunities such as underground
storage of carbon dioxide and hydrogen, or the development of
geothermal energy systems.


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FULL STORY ========================================================================== McGill University researchers are leading an international team whose
goal is to create a framework to help governments in the U.S. and around
the world assess and prioritize remediation strategies for orphaned oil
and gas wells.

These inactive wells represent environmental risks since they have
the potential to contaminate water supplies, degrade ecosystems,
and emit methane and other air pollutants that are harmful to human
health. But plugging the wells also offers various potential environmental opportunities such as underground storage of carbon dioxide and hydrogen,
or the development of geothermal energy systems.

Dealing with orphaned wells -- an incomplete picture and insufficient
money There are hundreds of thousands of orphaned oil and gas wells in
the U.S., at least 400,000 in Canada, and tens of millions of them around
the world. Since the former owners of these abandoned wells cannot be
traced or cannot clean up these wells, the responsibility for plugging
the wells typically falls to governments who may need further information
on how best to manage the orphaned wells.

In November 2021, as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL),
the U.S.

government allocated $4.7 billion USD to plug orphaned oil and gas wells
across the country.

"While this sounds like a lot of money, we estimate that the costs of
plugging the documented orphaned wells in the U.S. will exceed this sum
by 30-80% or possibly more," says Mary Kang, an Assistant Professor in
the Department of Civil Engineering at McGill University and the senior
and lead author of the paper published today in Environmental Research Letterswhich lays out some of the environmental risks and opportunities
of various remediation strategies, as well as the information that still
needs to be gathered. "And it will certainly not cover the large number
of orphaned wells which are undocumented -- whose very existence we know
of but whose exact locations and depth remain unknown.

We need to rapidly develop a framework and environmental monitoring
datasets to prioritize wells for plugging, since tens of thousands
of wells will be plugged in a matter of years." Over 4.5 million
Americans live close to unplugged gas or oil wells To gain a sense of
the larger impacts of these wells and help inform government policies,
the researchers analyzed data for over 80,000 documented orphaned oil
and gas wells in the U.S. while at the same time looking at available socioeconomic, environmental, and natural resource data. Hundreds of
thousands more of these orphaned wells are spread across the country.

They found that over 4.6 million Americans (or about 13% of the nation's population) live within one km (approximately 1/2 mile) of one of the
more than 80,000 documented orphaned gas or oil wells in the U.S. Among
this population, at a national level, there was an over-representation
of Hispanic/Latino and Native American populations. The researchers
also found that over one third of these wells are at about 1km (or 1/2
mile) from a domestic groundwater well, though they note that there is generally insufficient data about the potential health risks associated
with orphaned wells.

""Recent studies have identified air, water and human health hazards of orphaned oil and gas wells however the literature is not yet extensive
enough to quantify the risks of this legacy infrastructure across the
country," adds Seth Shonkoff at PSE Healthy Energy.

Environmental opportunities -- wind power, subsurface gas storage,
and geothermal development The subsurface is a natural resource like
any other and many present-day as well as future applications will
require access to subsurface reservoirs that are not compromised by
oil or gas leakage. For example, the researchers found that most of the documented orphaned wells (91%) are in areas where geologic formations
offer subsurface storage potential for carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and
natural gas, as long as they meet security standards. The researchers
also suggest that instead of restoring the surface to pre-development conditions, the land could potentially be repurposed to produce wind
power, since almost 75% of the orphaned wells are in areas with top
wind capacity. In addition, approximately 33% of orphaned wells are in
regions, such as North Dakota, that are considered moderately favourable
to geothermal systems and 1% are found in areas such as Utah, Colorado and California that are considered most favourable for geothermal development.

"This analysis shines a light on the need to find, prioritize, plug and remediate orphaned wells -- which are often located in close proximity to millions of Americans' homes -- and the major task ahead to understand
and mitigate their environmental impacts," said Adam Peltz, Director
and Senior Attorney at Environmental Defense Fund. "As Bipartisan Infrastructure Law- funded plugging programs ramp up, this study provides
an unprecedented examination of the nature of the documented orphaned well population at a crucial time. These findings also speak to the importance
of the pending Abandoned Well Remediation Research and Development Act
(AWRRDA) bill in Congress, which has the potential to accelerate research
to find and remediate the hundreds of thousands of orphaned wells across
the U.S. that remain undocumented."
* RELATED_TOPICS
o Matter_&_Energy
# Petroleum # Energy_and_Resources # Energy_Policy
o Earth_&_Climate
# Oil_Spills # Environmental_Issues #
Energy_and_the_Environment
o Science_&_Society
# Environmental_Policies # Energy_Issues # Land_Management
* RELATED_TERMS
o Fracking o Petroleum_geology o Methane o
Environmental_impact_assessment o Water_resources
o Greenhouse_gas o Evaporation_from_plants o
Environmental_engineering

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by McGill_University. Note: Content
may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Mary Kang, Jade Boutot, Renee C McVay, Katherine A Roberts, Scott
Jasechko, Debra Perrone, Tao Wen, Greg Lackey, Daniel Raimi, Dominic
C Digiulio, Seth B C Shonkoff, J William Carey, Elise G Elliott,
Donna J Vorhees, Adam S Peltz. Environmental risks and opportunities
of orphaned oil and gas wells in the United States. Environmental
Research Letters, 2023; 18 (7): 074012 DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/acdae7 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/06/230620174445.htm

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