The Placerita oil field in northern Los Angeles County is home to dozens of old oil and gas wells that have been left unmaintained for decades.
Trash and debris have long littered the landscape and equipment like pipelines and storage tanks left to rust.
It's a common fate for wells across the U.S.
that have run dry or fallen into disrepair, and a serious environmental hazard.
Many operators over the years have not plugged these wells, so they've become a source of greenhouse gas emissions, primarily methane, that can
have toxic air emissions.
They can leak into groundwater, they can still leak oil at the surface and create a fire hazard.
When this happens, it's often because the operator has gone bankrupt and its wells have been left to languish.
Or maybe the well was built before documentation was even required, so nobody knows whose responsibility it is anymore.
The exact number of so-called orphaned wells in the United States is anybody's guess.
States have counted about 130,000, but the EPA estimates there might be as many as two million or more.
And a lot of these are very old wells where the record keeping isn't very good and we just don't know exactly where they are.
When operators can't plug their wells, the responsibility falls to the government, and historically it's been a low priority.
But now, there's renewed focus on the issue, as President Biden's one trillion dollar infrastructure law devotes $4.7 billion to plugging
orphaned wells and restoring the surrounding landscape.
This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity with the federal orphan well program.
And it's just the start, because as the world moves away from fossil fuels, there's bound to be more and more old wells to plug.
One hundred and fifty years ago, the first U.S.
oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania.
Millions more came after, dotting the country from Southern California to Texas, Oklahoma and Appalachia.
About 940,000 wells are actively producing oil and natural gas today, but many more are no longer in operation.
When a well reaches the end of its life, companies are required to plug it, and oil giants like Chevron and ExxonMobil certainly have the funds to
do so. The problem comes though, when smaller or less well-financed operators can't afford to meet their plugging obligations.
Here at the Placerita Oil Field, the first wells were dug in the 1880s.
But the last known operators, Caltico and Century Oil, went bankrupt.
They did not properly maintain the site, and they basically left it abandoned and deserted.
Corrosion occurred.
Tanks and vessels are just left here rusting.
It's an eyesore, it's an environmental hazard, and it's a cleanup that's been long overdue.
The story of this oil field and how it became deserted is a common one.
But the California government is finally stepping in with its largest well-plugging operation to date, spending $3.3 million to plug the 56 wells
in this area. Bruce Weihs, senior oil and gas engineer at the California Geologic Energy Management Division, or CalGEM, is overseeing the project.
He estimates that the site hasn't had viable owners for around 30 years.
In this case, there's been no activity for so long, some people have moved into the area.
There's some schools nearby, there's houses nearby, there's highways nearby.
All these need protecting.
About nine million Americans live within a mile of a documented orphan well, which can leak contaminants into the groundwater supply if it's not
properly sealed.
And the infrastructure for these wells often clutters the surrounding landscape.
A lot of these orphan wells are either pipes sticking out of the ground, which create their own danger, or it can come with a whole set of old oil
and gas infrastructure.
Tanks, pumpjacks, things that are just left behind to rust.
And then there's the emissions.
Methane is the second most abundant human-created greenhouse gas, and it's particularly potent, with over 80 times the global warming potential of CO2
over a 20 year period.
And we know now that it's leaking from old oil and gas wells, largely thanks to Mary Kang, Assistant Professor of civil engineering at McGill
University. She says that until recently, people just assumed that methane leaks were minimal.
When I started doing these measurements in 2013, I was really surprised to find out that there were no measurements of methane
emissions from abandoned oil and gas wells in the United States.
My paper was the first to publish methane emission rate measurements directly from these abandoned oil and gas wells
Taking measurements in Pennsylvania, she was able to estimate the deserted wells account for about four to seven percent of the state's man-made
methane emissions.
Lastly, when wells aren't properly plugged and cleaned up, they can impede development.
That's a big strain on a state like California, that's facing a severe housing shortage.
There's many projects that get held up or don't move forward because there's a well onsite that hasn't been abandoned and an affordable housing
developer doesn't have the funds to abandon the well.
The 56 wells at the Placerita field are set to be plugged by year's end.
It's a minuscule portion of the over 5,000 orphaned wells that CalGEM has identified in California, but it is a start.
Since 1977, CalGEM has plugged about 1,400 wells throughout California, at a cost of about $29.5 million.
These days, Ntuk says it costs about $112,000 to plug a single well, though a well in an urban area of Los Angeles could cost half a million,
and an offshore well can cost two to three million.
Here's what a plugging crew is likely to encounter onsite.
Our well deaths may be anywhere from two thousand to five thousand feet in depth.
Of course, there are some that go down ten thousand feet at the deepest level.
That wellbore connects to the surface.
It's detached from any surface equipment or pipelines or flow lines.
There might be a pumping unit or pumpjack at the surface with a concrete slab, that's removed first.
At the Placerita Oil Field, the team has two separate rigs, one to clean out the well and one to plug it.
So they come in first with the regular rig and try and clean out the equipment out of the well.
There's tubing, there's packers, there's plugs, stuff that's broken loose and fallen in the well that they have to remove.
So far, Weihs says that they've removed about 900 tons of concrete and 42 tons of steel from the site.
Now, the team is using a coiled tubing rig to plug the wells with cement.
It's a large roll of tubing coil on the back of the truck that's able to go down the well all at once.
So they'll go down to the bottom where usually the perforations are, seal up all the perforations.
And then, of course, the most important is isolating the usable drinking water from the oil zones.
Last of course, they put a plug approximately 25 feet from the surface to make sure that nothing gets into the well.
And then cut off the top of the well and bury it and try and return it to the way the surroundings looked before that.
The entire operation can take anywhere from two weeks to six months, depending on individual well complexity.
Finding the funding to plug those wells is challenging and of course, regulations for what you were supposed to do when you stop producing have
changed over time substantially.
So if a well was drilled in the late 1800s, they're not going to be plugged to modern plugging standards.
That means that agencies like CalGEM often have to return to wells that were improperly plugged and do the job again.
That is, if they can even locate them.
We're talking about a century, or more than a century worth of wells.
This predates GPS.
This predates modern mapping and street configurations.
And then meanwhile, these well sites get overgrown by vegetation, trees, forests spring back up around them.
Finally though, there is now a significant chunk of federal funding devoted to plugging orphaned wells and reclaiming that land.
$4.7 billion in total is going to get distributed between the federal government, the states and tribal governments.
And states are going to get the bulk of that.
In the past, the Bureau of Land Management might have gotten a few million dollars a year to go after some wells on their own land, but there has
never been this kind of effort to get this much money out to states and tribes in order to address orphan wells on their lands.
Initially, states are receiving up to $25 million in federal grants, with more funding to come.
And California Governor Gavin Newsom has proposed a significant amount of state funding as well.
We put forward a proposal of $200 million to start taking a bite of the apple.
But Ntuk says that the actual cost of plugging California's orphaned wells and reclaiming that land is nearly $1 billion.
And the federal funding, which is set to be distributed over a 10 year period, is also just a start.
Certainly, this is more than a ten year problem, and it's probably more than a $4.7 billion problem.
The states reported a total estimated cost of over $8 billion to address the wells that they know about.
That doesn't even count the ones that they haven't discovered yet.
For those wells that are yet to be found, there are efforts underway to identify them using technology such as magnetometers, which can detect a
well's metal casing.
There's several groups that are doing drone-based magnetometry studies.
There's also helicopter-based magnetometry studies.
Historical records have been incredibly helpful.
So I think a combination of these modern technologies, whether it be magnetometry or LIDAR, in combination with historical data,
is really the way to go.
These well detection efforts aren't yet widespread though.
And we continue to drill more every year.
In 2021, the U.S.
began drilling operations for over 15,000 new wells, but modern mapping and record keeping, combined with increased bonding for drillers, means
that today it's easier to keep companies on the hook for plugging their wells.
California can now require well owners to post bonds of up to $30 million, so that if they are unable to meet their plugging obligations, that money
then goes to the state for well cleanup.
Here in California, we've plugged more wells than drilled new wells three years in a row, at almost a five to one ratio.
Unfortunately, Ntuk says that this trend isn't happening nationally, but he hopes that California can be a model for other states as the nation moves
away from fossil fuels.
Overall, Carbon Tracker estimates that it will cost about $280 billion to plug all the documented onshore wells in the U.S.
today.
We know how to fix it.
We know how to plug and reduce those emissions.
It's not just engineering.
I think it's a combination of engineering and economics and policy.