When old oil wells become 'orphans,' that's a problem

0:00All across America, there are aging oil and gas wells no longer being used to extract oil or natural gas. A lot of them, and there are a lot of them, don't have anyone on the hook to seal them up. There's a term for these wells. I would say as far as total orphan wells, it's probably more like one and a half million. Dan Arthur is an engineer who consults with petroleum companies on environmental issues. Sometimes he plugs oil wells for work. And in his spare time, he finds them for fun. NPR reporter Camila Dominoski went searching for wells with him in Oklahoma. Oh. What do you see? So what I spotted here is what appears to be an orphan well.

0:44Maybe a couple of orphan wells. So let's get out and take a look. It's charged. Watch out for buffalo poop. But because they haven't been plugged, they're still leaking greenhouse gases and other chemicals into the atmosphere and into the land around them. So these wells can impact people, the environment, groundwater, surface water, soils, all these different things over time. And, you know, it's frustrating for me because a lot of people don't see them. Consider this. All over America, aging oil and gas wells are causing real environmental problems. So what would it take to fill them in? What does it take to plug even one orphan well?

1:37From NPR, I'm Juana Summers.

1:47It's Consider This from NPR. Nobody knows exactly how many orphan wells are out there, but there are lots of wells we do know about. One of them is an old natural gas well in Maria Burns' front yard. It was plugged, but that was many decades ago. NPR's Camila Dominovsky reports on how you solve a problem like Maria's. Normally, the loudest thing at Maria Burns' yard in Ashland, Ohio, would be the cacophony of dogs. She runs a dog grooming business, and she has more than a dozen of her own pooches, all rescues. They're all old. But on the day I visited her, the loudest thing was, in fact, the giant drill out front, taller than a multi-story building.

2:35That drilling rig was solving a problem that her yard has had for years. There's an old gas well here, and around it? Grass didn't grow. The pine trees kept dying. Yeah. And there was another tree that sat there, and it died. This wasn't just bad for Burns' landscaping. Old wells can be bad for the whole neighborhood, the whole planet. To explain what was happening, we need to go back to 1911, before the houses on this block were built, when an oilman named E.C. McManoway drilled a natural gas well here, a hole punching deep underground to extract valuable fuel. For 40 years, this well produced natural gas, but over time the flow slowed, and in 1953 the well was plugged.

3:1970 years passed, and things started to leak from deep underground. Old wells can be pathways to the surface for natural gas, largely methane, which warms the climate, or other chemicals that can harm water, harm people, harm Burns' pine trees. Maria Burns is 79 years old. She grew up here. She saw the crew that filled this well up so long ago. I can remember because my sister and I were just little. And for decades, the plugged well was not a problem. But eventually, those pine trees started dying. Now, this was not Maria Burns' responsibility. She didn't drill this well. The problem was it wasn't anybody's responsibility.

4:03It's something called an orphan oil well, meaning a well that no one is legally on the hook for anymore. But it was in Burns' yard, so she did some research and reached out for help. It took me quite a while, but it's called the Orphan Well Program in Ohio. The program pays to seal up those old wells, make them safer. But you have to get on a list because evidently there are a few. Quite a few. There are surely tens of thousands of unplugged wells in Ohio. That's Mary Mertz, the director of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. In fiscal year 24, we plugged 353 wells. And I know that doesn't sound like a lot.

4:46But, she says, it's a lot more than the state used to plug. Other states have their own programs, and the federal government has also designated billions of dollars to well plugging. Ted Bettner is a senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute, a regional think tank, who has studied orphan wells. He says Ohio is doing a lot right. For instance, the program is funded by a fee on oil production instead of landing on taxpayers. So the industry is paying to clean up its own footprint. So I do think Ohio offers a good example of what they're doing in a very small way that needs to be much larger in size.

5:24The scale of the problem is daunting, especially when you think about what's involved in actually fixing each one of those wells, like Burns's. What we are doing right now is we are drilling out that cement plug that was placed in 1953. That's Amanda Vise, a vice president with CSR Services. Her company is plugging this well at Maria Burns' house. But first, they have to clean out everything that's in there now. Vise shows me the mobile drilling rig parked in front of the house. It's a red truck, bigger than a pickup, smaller than an 18-wheeler, with a three-story tall mast rising from the back, holding up a drill.

6:03The equipment is big, but the cement that it's pulling up from underground comes out in tiny chunks. A little bit larger than sugar crystals. After the old plug comes out, the team will fill the well again from the bottom to the top, and then plant Maria Burns some new shrubs. This whole process is not cheap and depends on how complicated each well is to work with. But honestly, it all just depends on what's there as to how long it takes and how much it costs. This well was on the tricky side. It took weeks just to drill out the old plug. It was bundled with one other well in the contract with the state, and it cost more than$400 ,000 to plug them both.

6:46Some estimate there are over a million orphan wells to plug right now. And then there's the uncomfortable fact that plugs don't last forever. The old plug here lasted less than one lifetime. I asked Vise, How can we be sure that the wells we're plugging now, 50 or 100 years from now, they're going to need to drill up and plug again? So there's no guarantee of that, what happens 100 years down the line. But, she says, the industry standards for well plugging have improved over the years, so plugs should last longer than they used to. It'll last long enough for Maria Burns, at any rate. She watched that noisy drilling rig at work with satisfaction.

7:28I'll be glad to get it done and over with and never have to worry about it again. One down. About a million to go. That was reporting from NPR's Camila Dominovsky. This episode was produced by Vincent Acovino. It was edited by Patrick Jeren Watananan and Cara Platoni. Our executive producer is Sammy Yennigan.

7:53It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Juana Summers.