Zombie Wells: A $280 Billion Problem The US Can’t Ignore

One hundred and fifty years of oil and gas production in the United States has left millions of abandoned wells scattered across the country. Although they don’t have much, if any, oil and gas left to offer, the wells are still very productive. Unfortunately, what they produce is a veritable Pandora’s box of toxins that threaten local human and environmental well-being.

“These old pollution sites are environmental hazards,” states a United States Department of the Interior site dedicated to orphan fountains. “(They) endanger public health and safety by contaminating groundwater, emitting harmful gases like methane, littering the landscape with rusty and dangerous equipment, creating flood and sinkhole risks, and harming wildlife.”

Many of these wells – known as “orphan wells” no longer have any official owners, and therefore their proper decommissioning has become the responsibility of the United States government. And while the country has made major strides in addressing the widespread and growing problem of orphan wells, most notably through the Biden Administration’s recent bipartisan Infrastructure Act, which allocates $4.7 billion for this purpose alone, there is still a ways to go. long way to solve the problem. emission.

While public and private interests have made efforts over time to properly plug and seal old wells so they don’t leak harmful gases and chemicals, about 2.6 million onshore wells remain unsealed according to a 2020 report from the environmental observatory Carbon Tracker. And these are just the ones we know about. The report estimates another 1.2 million undocumented wells exist nationwide. Plugging just the 2.6 million wells we know about is estimated to cost $280 billion — meaning the $4.7 billion earmarked by the bipartisan Infrastructure Act will barely register.

Moreover, many of the wells that were plugged are now opening. According to Reuters Report in West Texas,”In the past two years, more and more abandoned wells have started to overflow or even geyser-like geyser, form salt and chemical lakes, or cause sinkholes.” There are several possible explanations for this phenomenon.

The first of which is that The Railroad Commission (RRC), which for some reason is the regulatory body that oversees oil and gas operations in Texas, did a poor job in the sealing process. In the absence of a solvent owner of record for an abandoned oil and gas well, RRC is legally responsible for properly sealing it.

The second major problem appears to stem from increased underground pressure from the region’s shale boom. When hydraulic fracturing is used to extract oil and gas, huge amounts of water gushes out of the well along with it. This salty “wastewater”. contains dangerous elements such as radium and boron and is mostly pumped back into the ground. But if it is pumped too deep, it risks triggering earthquakes. And if it’s pumped too shallow, underground pressure rises and poorly sealed wells begin to blow.

This became a major problem in Texas, home to the Permian Basin, the heart of the US shale revolution and the nation’s largest oil field. Billions of gallons of wastewater have been injected into underground reservoirs there and likely contribute to the problem of previously plugged “zombie wells” springing back to life.

While the RRC dismissed reports that the problem of “zombie wells” is widespread and whether their connection to wastewater injection is empirically founded, scientific evidence for the connection is being built – as well as public and private control. Indeed, the US Environmental Protection Agency has said it will investigate if necessary revoke the authorization authority of the RRC for disposal wells for such wastewater, in response to a federal complaint filed by the Texas watchdog group Commission Shift.

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

More top reads from Oilprice.com