National Energy Technology Laboratory is embracing a new technology called geospatial mapping to locate hard-to-find orphaned oil and gas wells.
“Finding the location and characterizing these orphaned wells is critical to ensure safe and effective plugging, which will help reduce risks to the environment, climate and human health and safety,” NETL geo-data scientist Jennifer Bauer said.
By estimates, there are hundreds of thousands of these orphaned wells across the country, many of which were installed more than a century ago, predating digital records, NETL said. These undocumented orphan wells, or UOWs, are often in unknown locations and their numbers range from 120,000 to 800,000 across the country. The definition of orphaned wells can vary from state to state, but generally orphaned wells are defined as idle wells for which the operator is unknown or insolvent.
In West Virginia, according to the Department of Environmental Protection, any well not in use for 12 consecutive months is considered to be abandoned, but the subset of abandoned wells that have no known responsible party or which are registered to a known, but defunct responsible party are orphaned.
West Virginia has 15,655 total abandoned wells — about 6,300 of those considered orphaned. And those are just the known wells.
Bauer said, “Traditional means of locating wells can include citizen reports, use of historical documents, and field-based data collection using drones equipped with various sensors and instruments, such as methane detectors, to find the wells on the ground.”
But advances in technology have opened the door for the additional use of geospatial data – which includes information about the physical location of objects, features and phenomena on the Earth’s surface, such as latitude, longitude, elevation and other key attributes.
“Geospatial data and analytics offer a way to analyze and understand complex spatial relationships between features on the Earth’s surface,” Bauer said. “When it comes to locating orphaned wells, field-based data collection methods generate spatial data that can be analyzed and integrated with additional geospatial data sets, including geological data, production records and other spatially referenced information to identify areas where UOWs are more likely to be located.”
NETL said Bauer’s research is leveraging geographic information systems to integrate known well records with digitized historic records, wells identified from field-based collection efforts and patterns in well development trends across the U.S. over time to help predict the most likely locations where UOWs could exist so they can be targeted for field-based sampling and verification to inform state plugging strategies.
Geospatial data and analytics can also be applied to help reduce the overall area that must be searched with sensors or field-based crews to locate these wells. The technique also offers insights into the potential environmental challenges detection teams and plugging operations might encounter when attempting to access these UOWs, such as dense vegetation, urban areas and road access limitations, among others.
NETL said Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funding enabled a collaboration between the U.S. Department of Energy and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission to develop a program to reduce the impact of UOWs. The IIJA provides investments to plug these UOWs, which will help communities reduce methane emissions and eliminate other environmental impacts.
The IIJA is bringing $212 million all told to West Virginia to plug as many orphaned wells as possible. DEP will receive money in three phases. As part of the initial grant phase, West Virginia received $25 million as a one-year grant, which was effective Oct. 1, 2022, to cap about 160 orphaned wells.
Under the next phase, the formula grant phase, West Virginia will receive $117 million over five years. And the third is the performance grant period, with a maximum total eligibility of $70 million.
