
Millions of abandoned oil wells are leaking methane, a climate menace - montalbano
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-drilling-abandoned-specialreport/special-report-millions-of-abandoned-oil-wells-are-leaking-methane-a-climate-menace-idUSKBN23N1NL
======
toomuchtodo
> A school district in Beverly Hills, California, was saddled with a bill of
> at least $11 million to plug 19 oil wells on the property of its high
> school, after a judge in 2017 absolved Venoco LLC - the bankrupt company
> that had been operating the wells - of any responsibility for clean-up
> because other creditors took priority. The city of Beverly Hills is
> contributing another $11 million to the job.

> “This is an incredible amount of money” siphoned away from education, said
> Michael Bregy, superintendent of the Beverly Hills Unified School District.

> State and federal regulations normally require drillers to pay an up-front
> bond to cover future cleanups if they go belly-up. But the rules are a
> patchwork, with wildly differing requirements, and they seldom leave
> governments adequately funded. In Pennsylvania, for example, it would take
> several thousand years to plug its estimated backlog of 200,000 abandoned
> oil wells at the current rate of spending, according to data from the state
> regulator.

> Oil-industry lobbyists have been fighting state and federal efforts to
> increase the bonding, arguing it would hurt jobs and economic growth during
> an already tough time for the industry.

> “States and the federal government have many sources of funding available to
> reclaim and plug abandoned wells,” said Reid Porter, a spokesman for the
> American Petroleum Institute, the country’s largest oil and gas trade group.

Corporate pork, plain and simple. We can't kill these jobs and this energy
source fast enough.

~~~
fenwick67
Once again, the American tradition of privatizing gains and socializing losses
lives on.

~~~
nsxwolf
Why wouldn't we socialize the losses here? It's not a handful of elites that
just swooped in and took a bunch of money then stuck us with the bill for
their garbage. We're all the consumers here. We create the problem with our
demand for their product.

~~~
chillwaves
Then why are the profits privatized?

~~~
lotsofpulp
Because sufficient voters like to think they will be part of the group who are
or one day will benefit from the privatized profits, and therefore imagine
themselves enjoying the spoils it would afford.

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pp19dd
I found borehole inspection videos very instructive.

\- 'Several oil and gas wells':
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9gpowN3k0M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9gpowN3k0M)

\- 'Methane bubbling in water well':
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTZp1e0uc0c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTZp1e0uc0c)

\- 'Sample Oil Well Video Inspection':
[https://youtu.be/Ei2xI4_IhbQ?t=173](https://youtu.be/Ei2xI4_IhbQ?t=173)
(shows perforations)

That last video has multiple scenarios that I think help illustrate how wells
work (water wells too) and what happens in their lifecycles. Worth watching
from the beginning - it's a pinch more complicated than meets the eye.

~~~
fenwick67
That third video is very trippy, you could put a lot of those short clips on
loop in an art museum and they wouldn't be out of place.

------
nogabebop23
Alberta has a fund for this exact purpose: to remediate & reclaim wells that
may be 50+ years old where the owner no longer exists. Companies fund it on
the front-end.

Even after recognizing the potential problem of abandonned wells the fund is
massively underfunded; I can't imagine what land owners must be going through
that don't have any protection. One difference: in our jurisidiction they
usually only own the land rights (vs. subsurface mineral) so the leases paid
are for access and generally pretty small. this article doesn't get into the
weeds but I wonder if the US owners have mineral rights (based on the mention
of royalty share) and thus the responsibility for Rec & Rem is more
complicated.

~~~
lambda_tango
Other provinces have funds as well, and the federal government just allocated
a couple billion to the programs in Alberta, BC, and Saskatchewan, as part of
the COVID response. My employer's already gotten some extra subcontracting
work out of those programs.

Yay for jobs programs, I guess.

~~~
soperj
as far as jobs programs go, that's actually a good one.

------
munificent
As doom-and-gloom as this article is, there is a very positive interpretation
of this.

The climate change effects we have been documenting and experiencing
implicitly include all of the methane from these leaks. It's not like
discovering these means climate change is _worse_ than we realized. We've
already been measuring the consquences of climate change -- the total sum of
everything harming the environment -- so discovering a new component doesn't
change that total sum, it just changes the relative proportion of _other_
factors that go into the sum.

So what this is really saying is that a major contributor to climate change is
a methane leaks that _no one is using_. That's good news. It means we can fix
these without having to make any sacrifices other than the (admittedly very
large) cost to plug the wells.

That's a lot easier than stopping CO2 production caused by _useful_ things
like energy production and transportation. To reduce those causes, you have to
actually take away real benefits from people.

But these leaks are just going into the air. No one benefits from them, so no
one will be harmed by their absence. We can just fix them.

~~~
perfunctory
as a counter argument, incurring costs to plug the wells will make _useful_
things more expensive and will take them away from some people.

~~~
inetknght
It's not useful if its true cost isn't being reflected

~~~
perfunctory
I totally agree. I am not saying we shouldn't plug the wells. I am saying it's
not necessarily easier than _stopping CO2 production_.

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labelbias
There's absolutely no way these oil wells are leaking as much methane as
Siberian plain slowly melting. I did a calculation a while ago and it ended up
being equivalent to 125 years of 2019 CO2 emissions.

Once these natural stores of gas start getting into atmosphere due to 2nd-3rd-
nth order effects these little gas leaks from human made oil wells are
nothing.

~~~
blunte
Their relative insignificance doesn't mean we should not clean up after
ourselves.

~~~
Scramblejams
Always a good idea to clean up after ourselves, but limited resources are
limited, certainly inadequate to the big picture requirements (i.e. turn the
planet's temperature down slightly and hold it there), and so prioritization
is necessary if the goal is to be reached.

~~~
jamcobs
hi

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LatteLazy
It's amazing to me that from the local to (inter)national level there is no
real requirement for companies to price this cost into production.

Insurance? No. Bankruptcy priority? No. Posting of bonds? No. Reservation of
funds? No. Everyone involved knew this and still they sign off.

~~~
thephyber
It's almost as if those in charge of the law and those in charge of business
don't want it that way.

~~~
LatteLazy
One of the examples they list is a school district. If I were the commissioner
(or whatever) for that district (which is now out $10m), I'd never have signed
off on this without some cast iron insurance. How does that guy still have a
job? How hasn't he been run out of town? That's what confuses me.

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wigl
Used to be in the oil and gas space. One of the biggest issues with orphaned
wells is that local enforcement is so comically lax.

[https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/11/orphaned-oil-
wells-...](https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/11/orphaned-oil-wells-to-
squeeze-state-coffers-249138)

For example, the article says PA has 200k abandoned wells, but the number is
likely 500k-750k, according to Mary Kang's work.
[https://www.pnas.org/content/113/48/13636](https://www.pnas.org/content/113/48/13636)

Why you ask? There is NO required security for unconventional wells (most
wells on the Marcellus) and only $25k required as a blanket security. You bet
that that's going to be factored into the P/L. Abandoned wells are defined by
the fact that there is no existing LLC left on the title.

[http://iogcc.ok.gov/Websites/iogcc/images/Publications/2019%...](http://iogcc.ok.gov/Websites/iogcc/images/Publications/2019%2012%2031%20Idle%20and%20Orphan%20oil%20and%20gas%20wells%20-%20state%20and%20provincial%20regulatory%20strategies%20\(2019\).pdf)

>"The average cost per well ranged from $3,700 to $101,000, with most in the
$10,000 to $80,000 range. The overall average for the states is $18,940."

What if you own a bunch of stripper wells like in PA? Well when they only
produce <15bbl a day each for a short life time, why bother when you can
dissolve eventually and start anew? If the PA DEP's permit surcharge is only
$50-200, do you really think they'll make any progress?

~~~
fghorow
I've heard some stories about abandoned PA wells too. One version claimed that
tens (hundreds?) of thousands were from the late 1800s to early 1900s, with
old records lost. That means people do NOT know where they are. That always
struck me as an opportunity for some enterprising remote sensing co. (even one
formed by HN readers, hint hint!) to step into the breach and _find_ them. You
can't remediate it, if you don't know where it is.

------
Ductapemaster
I'm in the IoT space and interestingly had a lot of contact in the last 6
months with firms doing contract work for the oil companies, or providing
private services to monitor methane for working wells. The regulatory
structures have been changing a lot lately, and now the old methods like
flying over a field of wells and measuring aggregate methane levels is no
longer sufficient. There now is a lot of interest and energy behind doing per-
well monitoring.

I'm hoping that this means wells 50 years from now will be safer, but
unfortunately it doesn't address a lot of the old wells that are a problem
today...

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perfunctory
The scariest thing about climate change is not the climate change itself, but
the realisation that nobody is really trying to fix it. Nobody is in charge.
There is no any remotely adequate agenda to deal with it.

------
addflip
This is something I always worried about after buying my house in SoCal. When
I purchased the house it came up in the closing disclosures that there was a
"capped" oil well within 500 feet of our house. I search every where for it.
Asked neighbors and everyone was clueless to it's where being. Needless to say
I never found it but did have the air in our house checked for methane as well
as radon which were at normal levels.

The LA basin had a lot wells especially in the South Bay [1]. I could totally
see this being a problem especially since they were capped so long ago.

1.) [http://blogs.dailybreeze.com/history/2014/10/18/torrance-
bec...](http://blogs.dailybreeze.com/history/2014/10/18/torrance-becomes-an-
oil-boom-town-in-the-1920s/)

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quijoteuniv
A tax should be paid in advance for the cost of plugging the hole before they
drill. If they go bankrupt is paid already.

~~~
lostlogin
More directly - they could be told to cap a few wells before they drill a new
one. I assume you’d want them to cap more than one.

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mrfusion
I’m a big global warming person but I still have to ask this.

If there’s way more methane in the atmosphere than we thought doesn't that
mean co2 is contributing less warming?

~~~
luhn
There is not "more methane in the atmosphere than we thought," we've been
measuring it directly for some time.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane)

------
AnimalMuppet
A climate menace... and also the main component of natural gas. And we're
moving away from coal to natural gas for things like power plants. That's
_money_ that they are leaking.

(Of course, it may not be _enough_ money to make it economically worthwhile to
collect the methane...)

~~~
nogabebop23
gas is far more efficient but very challenging to transport and store. Often
it's far more economic to flare or release vs. try and get to some sort of
consumption market.

~~~
Synaesthesia
That’s what they do in Nigeria, but it causes environmental problems as well
as health problems like asthma.

~~~
dasm
Not only in Nigeria. [https://www.worldoil.com/news/2020/4/7/permian-gas-
flaring-d...](https://www.worldoil.com/news/2020/4/7/permian-gas-flaring-
declines-as-production-slows)

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exabrial
Keep in mind, the Obama EPA removed the tax reimbursement for maintaining dry
holes and other "Intangible Drilling Costs" This was done as a measure to
encourage divestment in oil based resources, but it of course backfired.

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voisin
The Canadian government’s Covid19 economy stimulus program focused on cleaning
up abandoned oil wells rather than bailing out the oil industry directly. Puts
people to work and fixes an environmental nightmare. It would be nice to see
companies forced to contribute to some sort of fund that caps these wells at
the end of life so environmental liability doesn’t get kicked to the public
when the driller goes bankrupt.

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Vysero
Yet another problem our generation will have to fix. It's okay with me though.
I would rather go down in history as the generation that fixed all the
problems than the one which created them.

~~~
Dahoon
A generation is "all of the people born and living at about the same time,
regarded collectively." Seems to me lots of the problems are from "our
generation". Microplastic and CO2 for example.

~~~
Vysero
You are confusing the definition. You should read on in the wikki for some
context. A generation is usually about 30 years. In this case, I am referring
to Millennial's.

