Plugging Orphaned Oil and Gas Wells: What We Know and Need to Know
Daniel Raimi
Date
Feb. 25, 2021
Our current best estimates for the number of abandoned and orphaned gas wells fall far below the true inventory, yet the stakes for the public are high: an improved understanding of these wells could help create jobs, reduce methane emissions, and improve public health. New research from RFF Fellow Daniel Raimi and Columbia University coauthors describes how a federal well plugging effort can help achieve these goals, particularly if policymakers have access to the information they need.
In many ways, the modern oil and gas industry is built on precision. Engineers design, build, and operate mind-bogglingly complex structures that can survive harsh temperature extremes or sit stably atop swelling seas, seeking out a needle of oil in a haystack of earth.
But it wasn’t always thus.
In the early days of the oil industry—starting around 1860—wells were drilled by brute force through pounding a steel rod into the ground over and over, creeping slowly into the unknown subsurface. And although many think of Texas as the birthplace of the US oil industry, most of those steel rods were pounding out earth in the hilly forests of Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, and West Virginia. Around the turn of the twentieth century—as California, Texas, and Oklahoma began to emerge as oil powerhouses in the United States—thousands of wells were still being drilled across the lesser-known oil regions of Arkansas, Kansas, Wyoming, and elsewhere.
And who was keeping track of all those holes? The owners, yes, but rarely anyone else, including the government. In most cases, public oversight and regulation of these wells ranged somewhere between minimal to nonexistent.
https://www.resources.org/archives/plugging-orphaned-oil-and-gas-wells-what-we-know-and-need-to-know/
