1 research outputs found
Documented Orphaned Oil and Gas Wells Across the United States
Orphaned oil and
gas wells are unplugged nonproducing wells with
no solvent owner of record to plug and mitigate them, such that the
responsibility often falls on government agencies and the general
public. Unplugged wells pose risks to the environment, climate, and
human health. To develop a national framework to quantify the environmental
benefits of plugging and optimize mitigation, we analyze oil and gas
well data from state agencies across the United States to estimate
the number of documented orphaned wells over time and evaluate their
attributes. We find at least 81,857 documented orphaned wells as of
September 2021 and 123,318 as of April 2022, representing 2% and 3%,
respectively, of all estimated abandoned wells in the United States.
We identify at least 20,286 potentially documented orphaned wells
as of September 2021 (0.5% of all estimated abandoned wells in the
country), of which 8% became documented orphaned wells as of April
2022. We estimate annual methane emissions to average 0.016 ±
0.001 MMt of CH4 for the 123,318 documented orphaned wells
as of April 2022, corresponding to 5–6% of the total methane
emissions estimated by the U.S. EPA for all abandoned wells. Although
well type (i.e., oil vs gas) is generally available (83% of the 81,857
documented orphaned wells as of September 2021), only 49% and 16%
of the wells have information on depth and last production date, respectively.
Overall, documented orphaned wells and their attributes, including
location, well type, depth, and last production date, require additional
characterization and studies to constrain the uncertainties. Nevertheless,
our identification and analysis of documented orphaned wells represent
the first steps toward characterizing the full set of wells eligible
to be plugged and remediated with the federal funding available in
the U.S. via the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Our results
can also be useful for the management of the hundreds of thousands,
potentially a million, undocumented orphaned wells likely to exist
across the nation