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it's a family Town um they have Great
Schools it's safe it's um it's close to
everything my family is all out there in
the area and um
we we were
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happy the most painful thing is to watch
your kids
suffer so I had
to really dive in there and try to
figure out put the puzzles of this
mystery
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together we turn now to the latest in
what's being called the nation's biggest
environmental disaster since the BP oil
spill today is day 84 of a runaway
natural gas leak above Los Angeles
that's emitted more than 150 million
pounds of
methane we have a history of multiple
legacies oil and gas might be the
largest all over the world we have an
enormous number of abandoned oil and gas
Wells you have literally millions of
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them methane is a dangerous greenhouse
gas it seeps unnoticed out of abandoned
oil wells and is an environmental Time
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[Applause]
Bomb wow
amazing this is very much a scandal uh
for 30 years um main has been leaking
from these
craters wow there's definitely something
happening
here and so it's like a ticking Time
Bomb It Gets grow bigger and bigger and
bigger over time um and then you know we
don't know when that bomb is going to gr
go
off
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[Applause]
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Let's see we have some remnants
[Applause]
here the PES BR Basin historically had
around 5,000 oil wells today there isn't
a single one that's still working
production stopped in the
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1960s the French called this part of the
alzas our Texas many of the world's
first refineries were located here
today these relics are monitored by the
French Bureau of geological and Mining
research the
brgm I work for the brgm as director of
the Eastern region of the Department of
mining safety we are responsible for
monitoring former mining sites on behalf
of the state we're currently monitoring
17 Wells which are showing signs of oil
leaks and we need to ensure these leaks
don't impact the local en
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we're dealing here with Wells that have
been plugged and some of them have begun
to leak again due to the way the well
head was closed off this well is almost
100 years old it dates back to the 1920s
and it's around 400 m deep it produces
both water and oil and it's right in the
middle of Farmland so the challenge here
is to try to stop oil from leaking out
onto the
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surface there are
12,500 old wells in France some are
monitored others not those that receive
little or no attention are called
Phantom Wells experts estimate there are
as many as 30 million abandoned sites
like these were
worldwide and 3 million of them are in
the us alone they're barely monitored
here
either I'm an environmental engineer I
work for the Department of Energy's
National energy technology
laboratory this is one of the most
interesting projects I've ever worked
on unexplored
topic nothing was known about how much
methane could be emitted from an
abandoned
well I also enjoy um you know you go out
in the field and you're trying to find
the wells it's like a little bit of a
scavenger
[Music]
hunt a drone carrying a device called a
magnetometer is able to detect metal in
the
undergrowth it's estimated more than
800,000 abandoned Wells are hidden in
the forests of
Pennsylvania in this park alone a team
found 200 of
them virtually none of them were
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documented we're about 2third of the way
there oh oh this is very obviously a
well that's right
there this one clearly has not been you
know filled with anything it's still got
the intact well head so this well was
just at some point the operator decided
it was no longer were economically
feasible to keep operating it and they
could just walk away
without changing it at all
really oh let's see if it's
leaking try to focus a little better so
the infrared camera helps us we get a
nice picture an image that we can
visually see the
leak very obvious leak wow definitely
you can see it it looks like smoke
coming out so I mean it could be a big
leak of
methane I would guess this one is a
super emitter which is just basically
means it's emitting at a much higher
rate than a typical well let's measure
out oh
wow that one's really
high
so I'm going to write
down the high
flow
measured
between 4 and 8 lers per
minute I think sometimes Wells that
might be closer to people's homes if
they're citizens that are that um send
complaints to the D about Wells on their
property those tend to get uh more
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attention the elementary school that I
went to as a matter of fact had a well
in the front yard really yes when we'd
go out on the playground sometimes the
well would start uh the pump would start
working I am uh reporter and editor at
uh the Bradford
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era it is difficult to write about the
industry because there's a a very high
number of people in this region who are
employed in some fashion with the oil
industry so the people in the
area don't talk as much about the
environmental impacts of drilling or the
environmental impacts of abandoned or
orphan
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Wells but in the time that I have worked
at the paper I remember three separate
houses have exploded and caught fire
because of uh natural gas or methane and
knowing that there are so many 397 in
the city of Bradford abandoned or orphan
Wells
I was very concerned and
thinking is this going to keep
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happening the house was behind my house
about a block
away it was breakfast time it was about
I don't know 7:15 7:30 and uh I heard
kind of a muffled
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noise I ran out the kitchen door out
into the yard and I could see the smoke
coming up already from the from the
house
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burning I was a professional fire
investigator at the time that this
incident
occurred our tones uh for the fire
department started going off initially I
helped fight the fire before I started
doing my investigation
duties the home order was very
upset um but very little medical
injuries I'm fire chief of the Bradford
Township Volunteer Fire
Department
uh there was a couple of sides of the
house that was actually um blowed
out into the yard there's windows and
glass and
screens and blowed out into the
yard the investigation went on for
months uh and chief Burk house and I uh
were at the house almost every day for
30 some days uh we drilled holes in the
foundation of the basement or in the
cement floor and we took air samples
every day to check to see if there was
any gas still coming up out of there the
further we we looked into it felt it had
to been um some sort of outside source
that got into the basement of the
house we continued to U search uh for
before that um and it was later
determined to have been from a banded
Wells a short short distance away from
the
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property after the accident in 2011
Bradford residents tried to just get on
with their daily
lives what they didn't know
was that methane from other abandoned
Wells was still seeping into the
Earth until
2019 when another accident happened just
a few kilomet
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away your local news leader now live
from Buffalo this is News 4 at 6 two
weeks after that house exploded in the
town of alany it's possible it was
caused by methane gas seeping through
the
ground it was Ronald and uh Betty Joe
voles were the couple they lived on I
believe West Branch Road in alany the
people were not home at the time of the
explosion if the people had been home
they could have easily died the house
was blown completely to
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pieces
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many Wells have been sealed
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improperly the monitoring is all too
often
rare the well structures become
dilapidated while oil companies are
reluctant to pay repair and maintenance
costs the consequences of that have been
fatal
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it's a mountain so you don't know what's
beyond that because you can't
see I did not know they had a facility
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there after the blowout they uh they
found I'm going to say 40 Wells maybe
that needed to be sealed or or capped
and uh cemented and they found that they
had 63
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leaks Aliso Canyon was an oil field
until the early 1970s when the field was
purchased by SoCal Gas and converted
into a gas storage
facility ss25 was one of about 117 Wells
it was originally drilled in 1953 and
served as an oil producer until
1973 in 1973 the oil well was converted
to a gas storage well the corroded
location suffered an axial
rupture the leak was discovered on
October 23rd 2015 at 3:15 p.m. by noon
October 24th the first kill was
attempted the second kill attempt was
undertaken on November 13th now it
appeared to be a conventional well blow
up and the well continued to
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flow January 21
2016 I smelled the gas in the morning at
drop off for Lucas I asked Jessica and
she also smelled it my headaches
continue including fatigue and feeling
disoriented all
day September 13
2016 Lucas woke up at 3:00 a.m. with a
stomach
pain he had diarrhea and had a headache
and felt very
nauseous Lucas had a bad day in
[Music]
school kids were having
rashes uh
like small little I don't know like
almost like blisters or I I can't even
describe it um later
on a few months
after we started noticing like my hair
would fall off I would
find Bunches of hair on my pillows so it
was
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bizarre
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deception
manipulation and lies so when you do
find something that's
bad sweep it under the carpet and that
is their whole pattern in
practice I'm an MD medical
doctor people start complaining of all
kinds of unusual symptoms on the Urgent
Care
side
so they'd walk in and complain of a
headache and a nose bleed or a rash or
nausea vomiting diarrhea and they had a
combination of all these symptoms which
was very unlike people I've seen in the
prior 25 years that have done this so it
was like well what is going on so it
kind of raised my
[Music]
[Applause]
eyebrows the Vector is a gas it goes
through the respiratory route and then
it translated to the rest of the body
everything gets
exposed these people had been
exposed uh to an array of toxins even
today we don't know all of the toxins
because the Department of Public Health
and the Board of Supervisors failed to
file a subpoena to get the
list this is a letter I received and
other Physicians received from the
Department of Public Health and as you
can
see that they're requesting here it says
avoid performing any toxicological tests
these are not recommended or unlikely
prove useful data for clinical
evaluation of
patients and so what did you decided to
do just the
opposite
we did a full evaluation on it and had
it looked at by a Benzene
researcher and he made the statement in
an email that this looks like chronic
Benzene
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exposure they kept saying well it's just
methane but it you know it wasn't just
that later on we found out that crude
oil was coming up raining down down on
us and uh they
knew many victims are bitter about the
legal outcome of this environmental
disaster the SoCal Gas Company got off
with just an outof Court
settlement victims on average received
around €30,000 to compensate them for
lifechanging injuries in many
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cases the residents fight against the
oil industry was the meek against the
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mighty but one woman has sworn to bring
big oil to its knees Rancher Ashley watt
wants companies to be forced to face up
to their
[Music]
responsibilities my mar
and a
businesswoman I really enjoy hurting
people who have done me wrong and so
Chevron has screwed up my Ranch so now
I'm not just finding where else they've
screwed up on this Ranch I'm finding
where they've screwed up
everywhere my grandmother was born out
here my mother was born out here like
this is my land this is what's in my
blood Chevron made a mess and they
should have to clean it
[Music]
up the wells were drilled long before
the ranch owner inherited the land
little by little her property has turned
into a
wasteland today there are more than 130
abandoned Wells scattered over the
parcel hey Sarah yeah I'm at the
122 yeah it's still got like 50
uh PSI on the back side and then they've
got a gauge on the long string that's
also at 50 it's against the rules
right okay I'll take a picture I'll send
to you okay bye so it's a Chevron well
but it hasn't produced in I don't know 5
years 10 years like look there's grass
growing around it um so it hasn't
produced it's basically abandoned but
they haven't plugged it this gauge
should be zero and if it has pressure
that's really really bad that means like
something has gone wrong uh I mean 50
psi is enough to kill somebody um and if
you came out here it would it could be
like like if this went one day it would
be like shooting water and oil up in the
air her battle against the company
started in June 2021 when an old well
suddenly started spewing brackish water
it was spraying salt water and so they
had to bring in
offices and Rigs and 50 people for weeks
and weeks and weeks all around here and
had to build this huge facility to get
this well
plugged the harmful brine had leeched up
into the groundwater from normally
impenetrable strata deep
underground the liquid also contained
Benzene and other chemical
compounds to avoid contamination and
poisoning the livestock had to be moved
to another
Ranch it took the company weeks to get
the leak
sealed I think it's finally time to
realize like yeah things go wrong with
old abandoned Wells and if it's actually
100% of Wells are going to need to be
redone well then you start talking you
know tens of billions hundreds of of
billions of dollars in liabilities that
no one's considering right now so yeah I
think I think they are scared I think if
you start thinking that every well you
drill you're going to have to plug not
one time but five times 10 times over
its life yeah that starts to add up to a
lot of
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money bubbling brackish Springs in a
Barren landscape
ape those weren't there 70 years
[Music]
ago it's a dead zone there's never going
to be anything that grows there again I
mean it'll be dead
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forever and I am the general manager of
the middle pacus groundwater
Conservation
District there's a big lake Lake of
Heavenly Blue in the middle of the dry
plains of
Texas but it's an environmental disaster
rather than a resort the water is very
salty around it are methane and hydrogen
sulfide H2S or swamp gas a deadly gas
often found at oil and gas drilling
sites this is the Sloan bler number one
this is the Beamer lake whale and you
can see it up here about 150 yards uh
flowing it's flowing about 600 gallons a
minute uh it's high in
H2S I am up
wind uh and the wind to my backs I feel
pretty safe about this distance from
here I don't want to get any closer than
this cuz those the the H2S levels that
we've seen on this well are are lethal
if you breathe in if you're there in the
breathing space longer than a few
minutes you could pass
out
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Tai Edwards has been fighting for more
than a decade against the oil industry
regulatory agency in Texas the Railroad
Commission it is refusing to seal the
well saying water is coming out rather
than oil so it's not their
remit
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when it comes to abandoned oil wells it
always boils down to one thing it's
expensive the rarro commission goes and
plugs a well on the list average cost is
$5,000 $6,000 and they can go plug three
or 4,000 Wells at $5,000 a piece average
cost for Beamer Lake 20 30 40
million
less than a kilometer from Lake Bower
one more well has started to leak posing
the threat of another enormous toxic
spill in this region more and more
abandoned drilling sites are
crumbling the locals have even given
them a
nickname they call them zombie
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Wells
in January 2022 a huge geyser appeared
in this part of
Texas here too saltwater is gushing out
from deep
underground these accidents keep
happening and problems are piling up
along with them threatening an infinite
ecological
[Music]
disaster
[Music]
raw materials are also being exploited
on the Open
[Music]
Seas these drilling sites are aging
too look around there are no fishing
boats there are no touristic boats they
can behave here because no one is
watching them and my feeling is that
they really want to hide
[Music]
something
[Music]
this Greenpeace ship has left the port
of Hamburg for an expedition of several
weeks the mission to find old drill
sites and identify potential
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leaks I'm the unit head of the ocean
Department M within Green Peace Germany
and I'm working since 94 for Green
Peace in the morning we launched a
so-called sidescan Zona a sidescan Zona
looks a little bit like a fish and is
flying over the seaf Flor and um our
expert here Jacob is trying now to find
structures of the offshore industry on
the sea
Flor
there are 15,000 abandoned wells in the
North Sea today the esperansa is
scanning the British exploitation sector
including for old rig sites of the
British company Mobile North Sea the
sector is one of five the others belong
to Denmark Germany the Netherlands and
Norway
okay
starts no
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I'm a marine biologist and oceans
campaigner with Greenpeace in
[Music]
Germany I was doing a small research on
the blowout in
1990 and our blowout out is something it
must be something here in the UK sector
at the height of of
abine what I found strange is that they
stopped the
observation uh more
than 22 years now so they just didn't
care about it anymore or they said at
that time they have the feeling that
it's not any longer
dangerous and they have the feeling that
the amount of G is so small that they
can't stop the
[Music]
observation wow amazing wow very
good super happy and I'm shocked at the
same time you know yeah see that look at
this really sad but
happy this is really
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amazing so we are at the epicenter of
this main leag that has been known for
30 years and has very obviously not
stopped emitting methane gas which is a
very potent greenhouse gas in the
atmosphere methane is is bubbling up to
the surface and being emitted into the
atmosphere it's 28 times more harmful
than another greenhouse gas
CO2 it's a big Scandal uh let's be
honest I mean uh it takes people decades
you know 30 years we're talking now and
no one is taking care and is taking the
responsibility uh to close this leak and
to monitor it mobile nor was directly
involved in the drilling to this date
they have not done anything about this
leak and also the British government um
that got handed over um let's say the
area or the license uh for drilling
there uh it hasn't done anything about
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it
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in the North Sea most of these welds are
are abandoned or we dry
welds I'm working at the gomma ham
Center for ocean research in K GMA is
one of the largest Marine institutes in
Europe during all the Expeditions we
were able to dive down with the robot um
for at three Wells to quantify the
methane
emissions we see here is a 3D view of
the uh top thousand MERS of the seaf
Flor in the North Sea the the black
lines that you see are the drilled Wells
um and um the uh colored um blocks that
you see are the mapped um gas
accumulations in these upper thousand M
and accidentally they drilled through
one of these shallow gas pockets and
here at at this with this red blop for
example we see that these two Wells
these black lines were drilled through
this gas
accumulation so the the main conclusion
from from our estimates of the methane
emissions from abandoned Wells into the
north SE is that this is the dominant
input of
methane we have 20 to maybe 30 kilotons
per year of methane getting into the
North Sea from these abandoned Wells it
wasn't known because there wasn't
anything published so far um but when we
talked afterwards to some of the oil and
gas companies then it became clear that
they actually U Know quite well about
that
problem
yeah
in the US Clark Williams Dairy has been
keeping a close eye on the oil
industry's strategy regarding old
Wells my job title is energy Finance
analyst what motivates me is like being
a detective almost when you're sort of
pulling together pieces of information
from lots of sources because the
industry has been very good at you know
delaying or dodging his responsibility
for
cleanup
[Music]
since the 1950s oil and gas companies
have been required by law to seal
abandoned Wells immediately some
companies have found a way around that
they declare the wells inactive rather
than abandoning
them
[Music]
um and I'm going to be looking around in
Bakersfield where we are now just to the
north of the city there's a a big oil
producing
area and these purple dots are all the
idle Wells so California uh itself has
about 36,000 idle
Wells idle Wells are wells that haven't
been used for production in at least 2
years production of oil and
gas this is from the state's idle well
list if we wanted to we could just you
know just for fun we could just take a
look and uh and sort them so here's one
that's been an idol for 118 years 65
years 62 years 45 years like some of
them are have been Idol for longer than
I've been
alive one of the reasons that I'm
interested in idle Wells is that they um
you know that there's a a a real
risk that there's not going to be enough
money left to clean them all
up what if this is
deliberate and what if certain companies
intentionally saw to it that there
wasn't enough money left to properly
seal their
Wells Clark Williams Dairy has begun to
look into the dealings of a
multinational called accidental
petroleum the company originally owned
more than 8,000 inactive bore holes in
the region but a few years ago the
company split and it put all its old
Wells under the ownership of another
company the California resources
Corporation
CRC so this one this well
is number 301
in section
23 the operator is California resources
Corporation so this well hasn't produced
anything for the last 5 years at least
according to the the records we have um
so you know in theory you know all of
these wells will have to be plugged
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someday a black ring on the ground
surrounds the well
but how big is the leak
below and when will this well be
sealed I think the strategy of the
industry has been to some extent in some
cases to isolate these low producing
wells in companies that don't have the
resources to pay for
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cleanup really what the CRC operation is
it's it's essentially a declining
resource it's has more and more idle
wells in its inventory and it's
producing less and less oil so over time
you know what I expect to see happen is
it'll have more and more idle Wells
fewer and fewer productive Wells bigger
and bigger liability uh and it may
eventually not have the resources that
it needs to pay for
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cleanup
more and more housing developments are
being built east of
Bakersfield a promotional video says
it's a great place ideal for
families but do potential buyers know
those homes are next to an oil well
graveyard and a dangerous one at
[Music]
that the authorities in California have
been demanding the old Wells be sealed
since
2017 up until that year a company called
Sunray worked
here let's go take a look this is bler
well
123 owned by Sunray
petroleum and if you
listen come here
listen you can hear something
you can
smell a little something methane's
odorless but I
can smell something but do you hear that
sound that little hissing
sound it's been idle for years there's
been no activity on it but there's
something going on here you can see
there's just some tape
here just some duct
[Applause]
tape
all
right so I'm actually feeling a little
bit sick from that I think I don't know
what's going
[Music]
on hey Audrey this is Clark after our
visit I told some local environmental
groups and the state sent out some
inspectors to
check the state found 21 idle Wells that
were leaking
methane nine at concentrations that were
really high high enough to be
potentially
explosive so the good news is that the
state has started to plug some of the
wells but the bad news I guess is that
the problem is a lot more widespread
than just that one leaking well that we
[Music]
found
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