Abandoned oil and gas wells

[00:00:27]

RICK WEISS: Hello, everyone. I’m Rick Weiss, SciLine’s director, and I want to welcome you to this media briefing on abandoned oil and gas wells. This is such an interesting topic, I’m really looking forward to this briefing. The problem of uncapped, abandoned oil and gas wells is one that affects in a significant way at least a quarter of the states in this country. It’s of concern and interest not only to industry but to environmentalists. And it’s equally of concern it turns out to Republicans and Democrats. It’s one of those issues that’s seen as so important that out of the trillion-dollar Infrastructure Bill that passed just about exactly a year ago, nearly $5 billion is dedicated to helping to solve this problem. And we want to get into it with you today. It’s an economically and politically really complicated issue and that’s a lot of why you’re going to be writing about it in your states. But we want to make sure you’re familiar with the science behind the issue, as well, and that’s mostly what we want to help you do today with the experts we have presenting.

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Just a couple of quick logistical details before we start. We have 3 panelists today. Each is going to talk briefly, 5 to 7 minutes or so, to introduce you to aspects of this issue. We’ll follow that with Q&A. If you have a question you’d like to ask, please go down to the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen, put in your name, and news outlet, and your question. And if you want to direct it to a particular speaker, you can mention that, as well. And finally, and we’ll get to those questions after the presentations. A full video of this briefing is going to be available on our website probably by the end of the day today. And a full transcript will be added to that over the next day or so, as well. If you need all of that sooner, please let us know in that Q&A box and we’ll try to get something to you as quickly as possible.

Okay, I’m not going to spend time giving full introductions for our 3 speakers today. I want to just tell you very briefly that we will hear first from Dr. Mary Kang. She is an assistant professor in civil engineering at McGill University. And she’s going to give us an overview of the abandoned oil well situation, some terminology for you to know, what’s known about the number and distribution of these wells across the U.S. And some of the options for plugging or capping them. Second, we’re going to hear from Dr. Amy Townsend-Small, who’s a professor of environmental science at the University of Cincinnati. Who will speak about contributions of these wells to air pollution, including especially the risks from the potent greenhouse gas methane. And third, we’ll hear from Dr. Gregory Brian Upton Jr., an associate research professor at the Center for Energy Studies at Louisiana State University. And he’s going to focus on the impacts of uncapped offshore oil wells with some particular attention to the economics that are contributing to the problem down there in the Gulf. Okay, let’s get started and hear from the experts, themselves. And we will start with you, Dr. Kang.

[00:04:55]

MARY KANG: Okay, thank you for that introduction. Can you hear me?

[00:04:59]

RICK WEISS: Sounds good, looks good.

[00:05:01]

MARY KANG: OK, great. So, I’m going to first start with some definitions. There are a lot of different definitions for the term abandoned oil and gas wells and that varies among states, provinces, countries. But the definition that I’m going to go with today comes from the greenhouse gas inventory by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. And you can see it from their 2019-2023 report, this wording right here. And the term abandoned wells encompasses various types wells, wells with no recent production and not plugged. Second bullet point, wells with no recent production and no responsible operator. So, common terms might include orphaned, deserted, long-term idle, and abandoned. And lastly, wells that have been plugged to prevent migration of gas or fluids. So, abandoned wells include both plugged and unplugged wells in this definition. And that second bullet point talks about wells with no responsible operator. So, often, these wells are termed orphaned or orphaned wells. So, all orphaned wells in this definition are abandoned wells, but not all abandoned wells are orphaned wells.

So, there are about 4 million abandoned oil and gas wells in the United States and this just shows you a breakdown. There’s the largest percentage in Texas of 22 percent followed by Pennsylvania at 15 percent, Kansas at 11 percent, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Louisiana, California, Ohio, so forth.

And this is a map of documented orphaned wells, so which is a subset of the abandoned wells that I was just talking about. And there’s about a little more than 120,000 out there and that are mapped in this figure. So, what you can see here, you can see that there’s higher densities in the Appalachian region and in Oklahoma. There you see a lot in Texas, California, and so forth. I do want to say one more thing about orphaned wells. So, there are so-called documented orphaned wells that you are seeing here, but there are also a lot of undocumented orphaned wells. So, just there’s a quote for what I mean by documented orphaned wells. So, these are wells that are documented in state databases that have gone through some internal state verification to determine the well as being orphaned. But there are hundreds of thousands to maybe a million or more undocumented orphaned wells that exist across the country. So, whether we’re talking about abandoned wells or orphaned wells, they’re all they pose a number of environmental risks. One of them being methane emissions, which Dr. Townsend-Small is going to talk more about. But they’re also a concern for groundwater contamination. And so, this is what you would see if you took a slice through the Earth. You have different layers of rock containing different kinds of fluid. It could be oil and gas, saline water, and groundwater. And as you can see, the well provides a subsurface pathway for these fluids to migrate between these layers, and in some cases, making methane emissions to the atmosphere.

So, because of these risks, one of the key—the main strategy or what is required by regulation is to plug the wells. But unfortunately, many abandoned and orphaned wells remain unplugged. Because of that, there—the $4.7 billion that was mentioned earlier as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law was dedicated to plugging orphaned wells. So, these are the wells without a responsible party. But unfortunately, we just did an analysis. So, the total plugging cost for the documented orphaned wells well exceeds the 4.7 billion that has been allocated. So, this federal funding is not going to be enough.

Another important point that needs to be made is that plugging is not necessarily going to solve all the problems, whether it be methane emissions or groundwater contamination. So, there’s this figure here. Basically, this is a cross-section of what a well might look like. It’s—they’re—it’s quite complex. They’re complex systems, but you can think of it as there’s layers of steel quick casing or steel pipe and cement in between. And they’re there to prevent leakage and contamination. And there could be failures along any point in this system and these are called well integrity issues. And they are not necessarily addressed with plugging. So, well integrity issues need to be fixed before plugging. And we just have a recent paper where we studied this and we found well integrity failures rates of up to 32 percent. With that, here are my references, and thank you for your attention.

[00:10:09]

RICK WEISS: Thanks, Dr. Kang. Super-interesting introduction and a reminder that plugging is not the answer to all of our problems, necessarily, if there are failures elsewhere in the system. Let’s move on to Dr. Townsend-Small.

[00:10:34]

AMY TOWNSEND-SMALL: Hello, everyone. Can you hear me?

[00:10:39]

RICK WEISS: It’s a little low, but we can hear you.

[00:10:49]

AMY TOWNSEND-SMALL: All right, how’s that?

[00:10:50]

RICK WEISS: Good.

[00:10:51]

AMY TOWNSEND-SMALL: OK. All right. I want to start with an overview of methane and an overview of what it is. Methane’s a greenhouse gas and it’s the second biggest contributor to climate change from human activities. It has a stronger global warming potential than carbon dioxide and it’s most powerful right after it’s emitted. Because of that, a sudden increase in methane emissions can cause rapid warming. This graph shows methane concentrations in the atmosphere in clean air measured at a monitoring station in Hawaii. On the y-axis shows methane concentrations and the x-axis on the bottom shows time. So, over time, since the beginning of the century, essentially, we’re in a period of increasing methane emissions or increasing methane concentration rate. So, as I said, a sudden increase in methane emissions can cause rapid warming, so we’re—that can cause the rapid temperature increase or destructive climate impact. So, there’s a lot of interest right now in emissions reductions policies, both in the United States and globally. In the United States, oil and gas supply chain or just oil and gas overall is the primary methane emission source from human activities. So, this graph is from EPA and shows all of our methane emissions from human activities in the USA. So, natural gas and oil systems are shown in darker blue. The second largest source in the U.S. is direct emissions from cows. That would be in orange. So, oil and gas our best target for methane emissions reductions. My colleagues and I have found that in the whole oil and gas supply chain, the largest source of methane emissions is actively-producing wells. So, this pie chart shows of the whole supply chain from the wells where oil and gas comes out of the ground to pipelines processing, refining, etc. The lighter green pie piece clearly shows these wells are the biggest source, again, our best target for reducing emissions.

So, Dr. Kang did a great job of illustrating one really big part of the problem. We have—or many millions of these inactive wells in the United States. We also have almost 1 million actively-producing wells. About 80 percent of those are also what I call legacy wells. They’re very old. And hopefully, some of you recognize the person in this picture, Jed Clampett from “The Beverly Hillbillies.” I put his picture here to represent old conventional-style oil and gas wells. The oil and gas wells in blue, they call those marginally-producing or sometimes stripper wells. So, similar to these inactive or abandoned wells, these are a legacy of old types of oil and gas production, although they’re still in the actively-producing category. And what our research has shown is that although these are the most abundant type of actively-producing oil and gas wells, they produce less than 10 percent of our oil and gas nationally. But about 50 percent of methane emissions from oil and gas production is from these wells. As you just heard, we also have millions, 3 to 4 million inactive wells around the United States. These, our research shows, may add up to 5 percent of methane emissions to supply chain emissions. In addition to methane, both active and abandoned wells directly emit toxic chemicals into the atmosphere. So, this can include hydrocarbons like benzene, hexane, and heptane that can be carcinogens. Hydrogen sulfide, which is a toxic chemical. That’s because for active wells, some of them, especially legacy wells, only produce oil and they vent all of their natural gas to the atmosphere. And the picture that I’m showing here is a good example of that. It’s an oil well where all of the associated gas is vented to the atmosphere. For inactive wells that are a source of methane to the atmosphere, they don’t produce at all. So, all of the gas that’s emitted is a source through the atmosphere.

The last thing I wanted to touch on is how we measure methane emissions from abandoned wells. We always get a lot of questions about this. The first step is finding them. Sometimes they’re very hard to find. As you heard, a lot of them are undocumented. Those that are documented, the map is often wrong. The GPS location is often wrong, especially in Appalachia, which is where I live. It’s forested. Once we do find them, the first step that we do is to see if they’re a positive source of methane. We call this the screening step and you can see the student in this picture is doing the screening. So, what we do is test to see if methane is present in the well by using a screening tool. This is a really good example in this picture because it’s a very old well. You can see the well casing is actually made out of wood, which is not done anymore, so a very good example of well integrity failure. And the metal part of the well has fallen away and it’s behind the student. Here’s another example of well screening, but in Texas. So, a lot of well screening in our research group. If we do find methane’s present in elevated levels at the well, then we quantify the emission rate. So, we use a device called a high-flow sampler that measures the methane concentration and the flow rate of methane. But there’s a lot of other techniques that other research groups use like flux chambers of vent bags.

The last thing I want to mention is in addition to the $4.7 billion you just heard about for plugging orphaned wells. There is a new program for plugging marginally-producing, these low-producing active wells that EPA and DOE just announced for the states. So, $350 million was just announced and there should be another $350 million in funding to come. All right, that’s it. Thank you.

[00:19:17]

RICK WEISS: Thanks, Dr. Townsend-Small. And I want to emphasize one of the take-homes there of all this federal attention going to these orphaned nonproducing wells accounting for in the end relatively small percentage of the total emissions. Total wells out there, and that has a lot to do with the politics and economics that go on that we can talk about more perhaps in the Q&A. One reminder before I go to Dr. Upton here, all these slides will be available for people to study afterwards, and if you do have questions, you can put those into the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen. Meanwhile, let’s go over to Dr. Upton.

[00:19:53]

GREG UPTON JR: Thanks, Rick. Good afternoon. My name is Greg Upton. I’m the interim executive director and associate research professor at the Louisiana State University Center for Energy Studies. Today, I’m going to discuss a recently-published paper, as well as some ongoing research regarding orphaned and idle oil and gas wells, their cost to plug. And then quantifying methane emissions coming from these wells. This written transcript will be provided to the reporters. This work is with several coauthors, including Mark Agerton at the University of California at Davis, as well as Sid Narra, Brian Snyder, and Kanchan Maiti, who are all here at LSU. I’d like to also acknowledge the Center for Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, as well as the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources for financially supporting some of the work being discussed today.

To start, I’ll discuss the recent paper titled Financial liabilities and environmental implications of unplugged wells for the Gulf of Mexico and coastal waters. It was published earlier this year in the journal, Nature Energy. The question we ask is pretty simple. What are the costs to plug and abandon all wells drilled in water, which includes offshore and coastal waters in the Gulf of Mexico region of the U.S.? Although offshore and coastal water wells account for less than 3 percent of all the wells ever drilled in the US, over the past decade, they’ve accounted for approximately 15 percent of all U.S. oil production. Many states have orphaned well programs, as Dr. Kang mentioned. An orphaned well in Louisiana is an unplugged well for which there’s no financially viable company liable for oil field site restoration work and for which the state has taken on that legal responsibility. States maintain orphaned well lists and have programs to plug these wells and conduct site restoration. As was previously mentioned, the federal government recently allocated $4.7 billion to the plugging of these wells. Because states have had these orphaned well programs for decades, states have a pretty good idea of how much it costs to plug orphaned wells on state lands. But oil and gas operations offshore and in coastal waters are significantly more expensive. And state orphaned well programs have plugged very few of these wells in water.

Thus this recent peer-reviewed paper provides perspective on these costs of offshore wells and water wells. So, what are the results? Well, we identify approximately 82,000 water holes drilled in the Gulf of Mexico or coastal waters in Louisiana, Texas, and Alabama. Of these, about 78 percent have been P&A’d. Another 8 percent are actively producing or being used for injection today. The residual 13 percent or so are inactive and are thus most likely candidates for P&A work. We estimate the cost to plug all of these 19,000 or so unplugged wells would be approximately $44 billion. Of this, 30 billion in estimated cost on this for these inactive wells. Thus, there’s plenty of P&A work that can be conducted today that is unlikely to meaningfully impact oil and gas production. We also break out results by federal deep water, federal shallow water, state waters, and look at prior ownership of those wells, as well. You can find these breakdowns in the paper and a more—and the more detailed transcript which I’ve provided you in writing. The paper concludes with a discussion of environmental risks of unplugged wells led by coauthor Dr. Brian Snyder.

A review of the relevant literature concludes that environmental risks of unplugged wells declines as wells are further from shore and in deeper waters. One example to illustrate this is that it’s relatively unlikely that methane, which is of course a greenhouse gas, as Dr. Townsend-Small just mentioned, released from a deep-water well, will reach the surface. Because wells in shallow waters are also significantly less expensive to plug compared to the deep-water wells and their environmental risks are higher. One policy implication is that focusing work on the wells closer to shore and likely onshore wells will provide more environmental benefits relative to costs. This past year, I’ve also been working with the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources in assisting with both estimating the cost of plugging all wells in Louisiana, including onshore wells. As well as estimating the methane emissions coming from these wells.

This project is a natural extension from the previously discussed work. We have a team of field research assistants under the direction of Dr. Kanchan Maiti, who are taking detailed measurements of methane potentially leaking from these wells. These detailed chamber-based measurements are compared with less detailed and significantly less expensive flow measurements conducted by contractors hired by DNR. To provide state-level estimates of total methane emissions from orphaned and idle wells, as well as assist the state in prioritizing wells to maximize the emission reductions for a given cost.

This work is still in the beginning phases, but some preliminary results are as follows. First, and as anticipated, offshore wells are significantly more expensive to plug than onshore wells. Second, emissions are highly right-skewed, meaning that approximately three-fourths of the wells do not have detectable levels of methane being emitted with the less extensive flow base contractor measurements are taken. And that the top 1 percent of wells accounts for approximately half of the emissions. Thus, if emissions reduction is the only policy objective of the program, one strategy might be to measure as many wells as possible, spending more on measurement and targeting emitters. Of course, the tradeoff in this approach is that fewer wells would be plugged with the program. Also, there could be economies of scale of plugging multiple wells within the same geographic area that would be foregone with a more targeted approach. In coming months, we’ll have a sufficient number of detailed chamber measurements to begin comparing measurements from these different techniques and provide estimates of emissions across all of the state’s orphaned and idle wells. We hope these results will contribute to our understanding of the lifecycle emissions of oil and gas activity, as well as assist the state in running its oil field site restoration program efficiently. Thank you for your time and I look forward to Q&A.

[00:25:52]

RICK WEISS: Thanks, Dr. Upton. Definitely a different animal out there dealing with the ones in the water and that’s very helpful to see. I want to make sure we’re joined by all of our speakers here and we’ll start getting into the Q&A and discussion. I want to remind reporters you can go down to that Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen to ask your questions and I will be reading them to our team here. But I usually do start these briefings with a question of my own, same question pretty much all the time. And it’s one meant to be as practically useful, that is useful in a practical way, to reporters who are on these briefings. And the question is whether each of you could address as news consumers yourselves and looking at stories that you’ve seen coming out over the past year or more. What would you suggest that is going well with how reporters are handling this topic? And/or what kind of advice might you give to improve the coverage in the way that reporters are dealing with informing their audiences about this issue? So, why don’t we start from the top here with Dr. Kang and any thoughts you might have on the reportage that you’ve seen on this topic.

[00:27:02]

MARY KANG: Yeah, I think one of the things I do want to stress, I care a lot about methane emissions. I think it’s very important to quantify and reduce them, but there are a lot of other environmental risks. And I think for a lot of local people living close to these wells, for example, other environmental risks like groundwater contamination and air pollution are just as if not more important. And those risks I think are often not talked about as much as methane emissions. That’s one thing I would say. The other thing I would say is that plugging doesn’t guaranty that everything gets fixed. There are plugged wells that emit methane and we don’t really fully understand what’s happening at the subsurface. So, and also the wells that are emitting a lot of methane are not necessarily the ones that are impacting groundwater the most. So, there seems to be a lot of focus on let’s just plug the highest methane-emitting wells, but that may not be addressing the other environmental impacts, especially groundwater.

[00:28:09]

RICK WEISS: Interesting. And, of course, health impacts, which we haven’t touched on, as well, but methane’s not really good for people and neither is benzene, or toluene, or other things that are coming out of these wells. Amy, over to you.

[00:28:22]

AMY TOWNSEND-SMALL: Yeah, I completely agree that there’s a lot of good reasons to plug a well besides methane emissions, so thank you for pointing that out. I have been very much enjoying the stories and reporters that are digging into issues of financial assurance and bonding, which I don’t know very much about. The legal issues around well abandonment and, yeah, it’s a very interesting trail to follow.

[00:28:56]

RICK WEISS: Well, it reminds of the parking garage with Woodward and Bernstein, follow the money was the advice then and it still applies here, as well. Greg?

[00:29:08]

GREG UPTON JR: Yeah, sure, so I’m going to take the question a little bit at a different angle of just broad science reporting that and I think that these forums are really good for that. Of actually sitting down and doing a deep dive of the science. I think sometimes we read in a lot of the media science quoted a little bit loosely or not exactly accurately. And I think when that happens, it not only negates our ability to do science but also that credibility in the sphere. And so I really thank SciLine for doing this. I think that these are the exact kind of forums that really bring that credibility back of scientists doing real science. And trying to report that in a way that’s not advocacy or that’s not trying to push some opinion but just really looking at the data. So, that’s I think my, well, I guess broader comment than just on this topic.

[00:29:57]

RICK WEISS: Mm-hmm. Great. OK, well, let’s get into some questions from reporters and I’m going to start with this one from Virginia Gewin, freelancer based in Oregon. And she’s getting at what other air quality concerns do we see are have resulted from these abandoned orphaned wells. And some of you have touched on the fact that there’s more than just methane and climate change. Can we talk more about what’s going on in the air?

[00:30:29]

AMY TOWNSEND-SMALL: Yeah, I can address that. I think everyone here probably has something to share about that. But yes, there—natural gas consists of mostly methane, but not all methane. So, air toxics or harmful air pollutants can also be emitted from abandoned wells, as well as active wells. Yes, so I hope that answers your question. Some wells, as I mentioned, can also emit a very dangerous gas called hydrogen sulfide. It smells like rotten eggs, but that’s not present in every oil and gas field, but it is in some places. It’s usually very noticeable if it is because it smells very bad. But I would say harmful air pollutants are probably the biggest concern. Methane is not toxic directly to humans, but it can be an explosion hazard.

[00:31:45]

RICK WEISS: Others want to address the air pollution concerns?

[00:31:51]

MARY KANG: Yeah, so I—everything that Dr. Townsend-Small said. There’s definitely hydrogen sulfide is a big concern. There’s if you think about health impacts, there’s also right away at very low concentration, PPM levels can really impact you. But there’s a lot of questions about PPP, PPT levels, that are really hard to detect and long-term exposure to them, what are the human health implications. And I don’t study human health effects, but there’s a lot of questions along that line of looking at taking this data and seeing what the human health effects are. Just to throw out one statistic out there, there was a recent study on gas composition or gasses being emitted from abandoned wells in Pennsylvania that came out earlier this year. Where they were looking at various volatile organic compounds including benzene, which is a known carcinogen, and they detected that. And so if you detect it, it’s already too high. They detected that at 70 percent of the wells in Pennsylvania that they surveyed. And so that just that’s not a perfect number but that still gives you a sense of how prevalent these dangerous or quite, yeah, quite dangerous air pollutants are.

[00:33:13]

RICK WEISS: And just while we’re talking about the air pollution issue. This isn’t a question from a reporter, but I wonder if any of you can address the issue of the neighborhoods that are most likely to be around these wells. It’s not equal distributed across socioeconomic status and things like that. Can anyone address that issue?

[00:33:33]

GREG UPTON JR: Yeah, sure. So, as part of the IIJA funding, it requires that we look at the Justice40 Initiative, which requires that 40 percent of the benefits from these federal spending is accrued to these disadvantaged communities. And so the EPA has their tool that defines what these disadvantaged communities are. We can talk about the localized nature of that. I would personally rather it be I think a more localized than those larger census tracts. But nonetheless, we are absolutely doing that here in Louisiana. We’re estimating the emissions reductions within these disadvantaged communities and ensuring that 40 percent of those benefits would accrue to those communities. As well as estimating the economic implications of this activity. Part of the state admission of the IIJA was to stimulate these sectors for which at the same time you’re trying to transition away from. And so, yeah, so we’re estimating that with that project.

[00:34:40]

AMY TOWNSEND-SMALL: There’s a large number in the Appalachia, as the map you saw showed, in the Gulf Coast area. And one thing I think that often gets overlooked is Los Angeles, California, has a very large number of legacy wells both abandoned and active. So, of course, there’s huge disparities there in the neighborhoods where they get remediated and not remediated. And tribal lands, as well.

[00:35:15]

MARY KANG: Yeah, just to add to that, we did a—we published a paper earlier this year doing a national-scale study for the documented orphaned wells, which is just a subset. But basically we found that if you—we looked at different demographics and basically the ones that stand out are, well, Hispanic/Latino populations and Indigenous groups. They were overrepresented in terms within a kilometer of these documented orphaned wells compared to the national average. So, there’s—there you can look at this at different scales, as well, at a national scale, state scale, basin scale, and so forth.

[00:35:57]

RICK WEISS: That’s all very helpful, thanks. Question from Sandy Hausman from VPM News in Richmond, Virginia. Are abandoned wells a problem in Virginia? Does anyone know off the top of their head where Virginia stands?

[00:36:13]

GREG UPTON JR: I don’t. My research has really been focused on the Gulf Coast region here of the U.S.

[00:36:20]

AMY TOWNSEND-SMALL: I can quickly look. Hold on.

[00:36:22]

RICK WEISS: Okay. Great. Actually, I’m going to give you a minute to look, Amy, while we just do another question. We’ll come back to that. But this one is from Madeline Ostrander, a journalist based in Cambridge, Mass. What type and frequency of monitoring needs to happen after wells are plugged to ensure they don’t continue to emit? Mary and Amy, both of you, I think, well, all of you have addressed this issue that plugging doesn’t always solve everything.

[00:36:54]

MARY KANG: So, there’s no consistent program for long-term monitoring of plugged wells. So, recently, with the IIJA or BIL funding, there is a requirement to do some kind of post-plugging measurement. But there isn’t a requirement to do that, well, let’s see what happens a year later, or 5, or 10 years later. So, there isn’t anything like that right now. In terms of what’s required, actually there needs to be with—as a researcher, we always say there needs to be more studies. But in terms of fully understanding temporal variability and long-term integrity of these plugged wells, it’s really an open question.

[00:37:39]

RICK WEISS: Greg, same true with offshore?

[00:37:42]

GREG UPTON JR: Yeah, it’s a fascinating question. Even in thinking about the lifecycle of the wells that are out there. Because so when we do—so there’s 2 kinds of damages that are done potentially from these wells. The first is the climate damages and that accrues through the whole globe. So, it doesn’t matter what the location of the emission is, greenhouse gasses accrue to the globe and they impact the global climate. And so from there, we can apply social cost of methane and we can calculate that. And then you’ve got the localized damages, which is the other thing we’ve been talking about. But even to understand those climate damages, before we even get to the localized pollutants, you have to think about 2 things. Number 1 is if I take a measurement on a day, can I just multiply that by 365 and continue it into the future? We don’t know. You could have it where the methane emissions from the well increases gradually, peaks at some point, and then declines. It could be on the decline. We don’t know the answer to this. And then the second question we have to ask ourselves is is when you go and plug that well, are you abating all of those methane emissions. And if we want to conduct a societal cost-benefit test where we say, okay, this is the cost to this program. This is the climate benefits from doing that. We have to start answering these questions. And so it’s a completely open question but it’s really, really, really pertinent, especially when we start thinking about prioritizing ways to reduce emissions. These questions can really, really impact maybe what that prioritization is being. Maybe is this a way to go to reduce emissions or should we spend these monies to reduce more emissions with the same buck in some other area. So, I don’t have an answer but it’s super-important.

[00:39:35]

AMY TOWNSEND-SMALL: There is no monitoring of any well. Just want to make that clear, not active wells, or unplugged wells, or plugged wells. So, that’s a huge missing piece of this whole puzzle. None of them are monitored.

[00:39:55]

MARY KANG: I think it—I think the—I think one thing to give the states a little bit of, I mean, the—if you look at the regulations and what’s the driving force behind those regulations. They’re rarely driven by methane emissions quantification and reduction. They were—a lot of the regulations were originally designed to protect oil and gas reservoirs and to promote more production. Sometimes and then it was they also cared about mining, for example, coal and but also there are other minerals. And then later, they started to care about groundwater and environmental—other environmental impact. And really climate is a really new thing. And so for a lot of regulation—so they’re not designed, even plugging, they’re not—it’s not necessarily designed to reduce methane emissions. For example, in Pennsylvania, there are wells that are required to be vented because they’re in coal areas, because they don’t consider methane necessarily to be harmful.

[00:41:07]

RICK WEISS: That’s fascinating. A whole history of the regulatory process here would be really interesting to get into. Did you find anything—?

[00:41:16]

GREG UPTON JR: One quick—

[00:41:17]

RICK WEISS: Oh, go ahead, Greg.

[00:41:17]

GREG UPTON JR: Yeah, one very quick add on to that. So, in the IIJA, it’s Section 4601, I believe it is, is this $4.7 billion and that is under the methane emissions reduction part of the IIJA. And so that’s a lot of the reason why a lot of these analyses are coming out in this way because that’s what’s being funded. The states are coming to researchers and saying, “Hey, we need to quantify these because that’s what the federal legislation has told us to do.”

[00:41:42]

RICK WEISS: Hm. Okay, well, there’s a shift happening.

[00:41:45]

GREG UPTON JR: Absolutely.

[00:41:47]

RICK WEISS: Amy, anything about Virginia?

[00:41:50]

AMY TOWNSEND-SMALL: Yeah, I—I’m on the board of a nonprofit called Fellow Environmental Partners and we have a free open access web map of all the orphaned wells in America and I don’t see any in Virginia. There’s a lot in West Virginia. So, that is just for orphaned wells, but every state should have an office of minerals management, or in Ohio, it’s a Department of Natural Resources. And they should have a way to access the data. Some states are easier to access than others. In Ohio, you can look at all the wells on a map. So, I would be happy to help you look it up and we can work on it together. I can’t remember your name.

[00:42:41]

RICK WEISS: That’s great. And, of course, it’s not just about abandoned wells. There’s Virginia may well have a lot of methane coming from production wells.

[00:42:48]

AMY TOWNSEND-SMALL: Well, this map I’m looking at is just for active wells—or orphaned wells.

[00:42:52]

RICK WEISS: Orphaned.

[00:42:52]

AMY TOWNSEND-SMALL: So, yeah, that’s a subset of abandoned wells, but yes.

[00:42:57]

MARY KANG: So, actually, we did—I did do—we did do a compilation for all the states. And so in a published paper in 2021, so this is data that was accessed in December 24, 2020. So, Virginia had, according to the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals, and Energy and Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. There were 12,472 drilled wells, and then 10,204 active wells, and 1,386 plugged wells. And, of course, so this is—we didn’t look at the number of orphaned wells in this particular paper but that just gives you the other numbers.

[00:43:40]

RICK WEISS: Great. And I think this might answer the question then from Zakary Sonntag, reporter at the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming. He’s asking, “I’d like to know what reporting requirements exist for methane.” It sounds like you’re saying that at least until some of these new funded endeavors, there have not been reporting requirements. Is that correct?

[00:44:01]

AMY TOWNSEND-SMALL: Well, some states have laws and then, yeah, it’s very complicated. So, Colorado and California have their own state laws. And then as Dr. Upton mentioned, now there’s a measurement requirement that’s about to start for—or is starting, I guess, for states that are plugging orphaned wells. I don’t think all the states have been doing it, but yeah. And under the Inflation Reduction Act, EPA will be announcing regulations on methane from active oil and gas wells soon, I think.

[00:44:50]

RICK WEISS: Mm-hmm.

[00:44:51]

AMY TOWNSEND-SMALL: That’s my understanding. I’m not a lawyer.

[00:44:54]

RICK WEISS: Okay.

[00:44:55]

GREG UPTON JR: Yeah, so in some states, there’s reported bending and flaring, which is not delineated. So, we published a paper in the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy last year that really provides a background on that that I’m happy to provide anyone. But in terms of orphaned wells specifically within Louisiana, once it becomes orphaned, so we have a fee structure that’s on every barrel of oil and NCF of gas that’s produced that funds this program. And part of that funding goes to inspectors going out and visiting each one of these well sites. And they do assessments and then that assessment is used to prioritize which wells will be plugged by the program and what that priority is. While the contractors visit those sites, they historically have not had the equipment to give an actual methane measurement at those sites. And as we’re finding, this is not—it’s not trivial to get an accurate measurement here. And so that’s actually one of the questions before us today is can we develop a protocol that could be implemented by a nonscientist, by an inspector, to go out there and get these estimates. And so hopefully in the future, we will have a better handle on that, but that’s the current state.

[00:46:06]

RICK WEISS: Great. Okay, here’s a question that apparently a number of reporters are asking in various forms, including Jorge Torres, who’s a meteorologist at ABC15 in Phoenix. Can you talk more about the concern that orphaned wells may also contaminate the groundwater supply? What does that really mean? Are we talking about gas, oil, other contaminant? How big a problem is that?

[00:46:31]

MARY KANG: So, yeah, theoretically, and actually there are cases where there have been contamination of groundwater. The—there are a lot of challenges to actually quantifying that. So, we did—we recently did a national study on how much water—groundwater quality data is there within one kilometer. So, even within one kilometer, if you have data, that’s still not going to really tell you about groundwater contamination, as well. But still, that just gives you a sense of how—or how available the data is. And basically, it was 10 percent or I have to look up the exact number, but it was a very small percent of documented orphaned wells—or within one kilometer of a documented orphaned well there. Most of the wells did not have a groundwater quality data measurement available. So, that’s challenging. So, if you don’t have a baseline and then you—something happens, how do you know what happened? So, there are a lot of challenges there. So, yes, it can impact groundwater. It’s really an understudied problem. And I think one part, and I mentioned this before, but one part that people seem to conflate is that a well that’s emitting a lot of methane. Doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the one that’s impacting groundwater the most. You can have almost no methane emissions and it may be impacting groundwater. In terms of what it—what kind of impacts, it could be, of course, methane, but it could be the whole slew of gasses, but also potentially fluids and brines.

[00:48:22]

RICK WEISS: Hm. Okay. I’m wondering, Greg, in offshore wells, obviously it’s not groundwater necessarily that we’re talking about. But the water, you mentioned that methane in deep-water wells is bubbling through the Gulf, say. It doesn’t maybe affect the atmosphere above the Gulf. But do we know anything about what that methane or other contaminants might be doing to Gulf waters, themselves?

[00:48:47]

GREG UPTON JR: Yeah, so it’s fascinating. A lot of the literature that we lean on with that is after deep-water horizon and there’s—and this is I’m an economist, so this is a bit outside of my area. The environmental scientist wrote this section of it. But to me, the highlight was is that there are these microbes in the Gulf of Mexico that if you have a leak out of a well, the microbes are going to eat those hydrocarbons. Because there are many, many, many seepages, natural seepages in the Gulf of Mexico that those microbes, that’s what they do. They eat those hydrocarbons. And so it’s not to mean that we should have spills or that I would encourage having a spill, but that’s why if you’re thinking, okay, it’s way more expensive to plug that well offshore than it is onshore. And the methane we can clearly see is leaking into the atmosphere, with the 4.7 billion, we would not get close to plugging all of the idle wells in the offshore Gulf of Mexico. And so probably the prioritization is those onshore. But there are questions that we ask such as, well, what is the water depth before which the pressure of the methane would actually bubble up or just disperse into it. And these are theoretical physics problems. But again, it’s something that we don’t know definitely where that line is.

[00:50:06]

RICK WEISS: Hm, great. We have a question here from Jennifer Presley from the Journal of Petroleum Technology and wondering what your thoughts on groups like Project Canary and MiQ that work with the oil and gas industry. To certify their active wells to make sure those active wells are meeting methane abatement goals. Does anyone want to address the validity or trust in organizations like this?

[00:50:37]

GREG UPTON JR: So, as a state-funded entity myself, I decline to comment on a specific, you know what I’m saying, on a specific entity. It’s no offense to them, but that’s just what it is. But I can tell you that emissions reductions are really, really important now for the hydrocarbon-based industries here in the Gulf Coast. Because as we’re selling these products, we export these products all over the world. And as our customers are telling us that they want lower-emissions products and as the investors who are investing billions of dollars in the build out. And I’m not just talking liquid fuels and those kind of things, but also just plastics, and chemicals, and fertilizers, these things that are hydrocarbon based. And so companies, you’ve seen a notable trend of trying to credibly document their emissions in ways that perhaps aren’t legally required. But that these companies want to document those emissions to show that they’re competitive in order to be able to sell those products on to the global market. It’s definitely a trend.

[00:51:35]

RICK WEISS: Hm. Okay. Here’s an interesting question from Theresa San Miguel from KPLC-TV in Lake Charles, Louisiana. The 2021 death of 14-year-old Zalee Day, who died when a tank she was allegedly sitting on exploded has received a lot of publicity. Even though this was not an orphaned site, do some of the orphaned sites pose a similar danger? And explosion risk was mentioned at one point earlier. Can we get a little bit into that?

[00:52:08]

AMY TOWNSEND-SMALL: Yeah, it’s very sad. As Dr. Upton mentioned, I’ve also found that most abandoned wells are not a massive source of methane, not a major source of methane. But the top 1, 5 percent of sites can be a large source of methane to the point that they can be very dangerous, an explosion risk. So, yes, that can be a big problem, a fire hazard, explosion hazard, certainly.

[00:52:49]

GREG UPTON JR: So, with the chamber measurements that our folks are doing, they actually calculate the explosive limit and then they remove that chamber at that time that they could get to that explosive limit. Now keep in mind, they’re putting the chamber on and it’s putting that in. But that’s one of the actually the questions that we’ll be able to get at by doing this extremely detailed measurement. Is this a risk? What are those quote-unquote, “super-emitters” is the term that’s often used? Is this risk out there? So, I think that that’s one of the big benefits that we’ll get from this federal program is people looking at this, being able to answer questions like that.

[00:53:29]

RICK WEISS: Great. One more question here asking whether there are any studies about how orphaned wells might impact wildlife in the area. You showed, I think, Amy, some interesting shots out in the woods there. Does anyone get—anything getting bothered these wells?

[00:53:53]

AMY TOWNSEND-SMALL: That’s a great question and I don’t know, but I can try to find someone who might know. I don’t know. I’m not a wildlife biologist, but that’s a great question.

[00:54:08]

RICK WEISS: Okay.

[00:54:08]

AMY TOWNSEND-SMALL: I did measure some wells in the Tallgrass Prairie Wildlife Preserve where there’s some buffalo herds, so I have seen some wildlife near abandoned wells.

[00:54:24]

RICK WEISS: I’m going to throw just the last couple of questions out here. But I want to remind reporters as we get close to wrapping up, when you do leave this briefing today, you will get a prompt for a very short survey, just three questions. We’d be very grateful if you’d take the 30 seconds it takes to answer that survey. It really helps us design these briefings to be on topics and done in ways that are most helpful to you, so please do help us by doing that when you do leave. We’ve got one more question I want to ask from Virginia Guan based in Portland, Oregon. And then we’re going to do a round robin with most important take-homes from each of you to help reporters really concentrate on what you think the most important thing is for them to walk away with. But before we do that, from Virginia, is there any specific region in the country that you think is particularly having air quality problems due to these wells. Any part of the country anyone wants to point to?

[00:55:25]

AMY TOWNSEND-SMALL: Due to abandoned wells? I don’t know. I’m not sure.

[00:55:35]

RICK WEISS: Okay. We’ll look at those maps. Follow the dots. I do want to wrap things up here, start to wrap things up, by asking each of you to just summarize one good take-home point that you think if reporters are going to walk away with one idea. What do you most hope that they will come away from this briefing with? And, Mary, I’ll start with you.

[00:55:58]

MARY KANG: Yeah, so I think I will say that this is a problem that’s not going to go away. There are millions of abandoned wells and even if we stop producing oil and gas today, they’re going to continue to exist. And all the ones that are producing are going to be abandoned and eventually orphaned. So, this is a problem that we’re going to have to manage in the long term and not just for methane, but as mentioning about air quality, and groundwater, and other environmental impacts to wildlife. But I do want to say there could be opportunities to repurpose these wells and the sites for whether it be for renewables or for other uses. So, there may be opportunities here that we may need to leverage if we want to really maintain these wells in the long-term. Because even if you plug a well, there’s no guaranty that there aren’t going to be environmental risks forever.

[00:56:56]

RICK WEISS: All right. Amy.

[00:57:01]

AMY TOWNSEND-SMALL: I would say to address methane emissions quickly, which we need to do. We need to close active wells and reduce demand for oil and gas.

[00:57:12]

RICK WEISS: All right, and Greg.

[00:57:14]

GREG UPTON JR: So, my biggest takeaway, and this is broader than just this discussion, but over the next decades, the globe will likely spend trillions and trillions of dollars on decarbonization. And reducing the environmental externalities of the energy system. And if we want to get the most reduction in emissions for that cost. It’s really, really important to spend the time documenting carefully what are the emissions reductions you get from all of these different technologies. And so discussions like this are really, really helpful in that of doing a deep dive into one specific issue and understanding what is the emissions reductions that you can get from that. But the next step, which I think is equally as important, is having researchers doing the same process with all the different sources of emissions globally. In order to make sure that we’re able to, again, reduce the emissions by the most given the significant expenditures that we’re incurring in order to do that.

[00:58:18]

RICK WEISS: That’s a great point, and in a way, I see what’s going on now with abandoned wells and orphaned wells as being a testing bed for how to really address this kind of issue. It’s not the biggest emission issue out there, but it’s one that everyone could get behind, so a great learning experience. And what I hear from you, Greg, is it needs to be done at scale, so let’s hope that happens. I want to thank our experts, today, for a really interesting and informative media briefing. And all of the reporters who have taken the time to learn and take on the responsibility really of turning journalism’s eye onto this issue. And informing news consumers, the electorate, so everyone understands what the facts are around these issues as they make decisions in their lives. Thank you all for attending and we’ll see you all reporters at the next SciLine media briefing. So long.