Ticking time bombs - What risk do abandoned oil and gas wells pose? | DW Documentary

It is a family town. They have excellent schools. It is safe. It's close to everything. My whole family is in the area and we were happy. The most painful thing is seeing your children suffer. So I had to really dive in there and try to solve, put together the puzzles of this mystery... Now we move on to the latest and

what

is being called the country's biggest environmental disaster since the BP oil spill. Today is day 84 of an uncontrolled natural gas leak over Los Angeles that released more than 150 million pounds of methane. We have a history of multiple legacies.

Oil and gas might be the biggest. Around the world we have a huge number of

abandoned

oil and gas

wells

. We have literally millions of them. Methane is a dangerous greenhouse gas. It leaks unnoticed from

abandoned

oil

wells

and is an environmental

time

bomb. Wow! Amazing! This is largely a scandal. For 30 years, methane has been escaping from these craters. Wow. Something is definitely going on here. And that's why it's like a

time

bomb. It gets bigger and bigger over time. And then, you know, we don't know when that bomb is going to explode. Let's see, we have some remains here.

In the Pechelbronn basin historically there were around 5,000 oil wells, today there is not a single one left in operation and production stopped in the 60s. The French called this part of Alsace "our Texas". Many of the world's first refineries were located here. Today, these vestiges are supervised by the French Geological and Mining Research Office, the BRGM. I work for the BRGM, as director of the Eastern region of the mining safety department. We supervise former mining operations on behalf of the State. We are currently monitoring 17 wells that show signs of oil leaks and we must ensure that these leaks do not affect the local environment.

We are dealing here with wells that have been plugged and some of them have started leaking again because of the way the wellhead was closed. This well is almost 100 years old; It dates back to the 1920s and is about 400 meters deep. It produces water and oil and is right in the middle of farmland. So the challenge here is to try to prevent oil from seeping to the surface. In France there are 12,500 old wells, some are controlled and others are not. Those that receive little or no attention are called ghost wells. Experts estimate there are up to 30 million abandoned sites like these around the world.

And three million of them are found in the United States alone. They hardly watch them here either. I am an environmental engineer. I work for the Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory. This is one of the most interesting projects I have worked on. Unexplored topic. Nothing was known about how much methane an abandoned well could emit. I also enjoy, you know, you go out into the countryside and try to find the wells, it's like a treasure hunt. A drone carrying a device called a magnetometer is capable of detecting metals in the undergrowth. It is estimated that 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 documented. We're about two-thirds of the way there. Oh, this is obviously a pit. It's right there. This clearly hasn't been filled with anything. The mouth of the well is still intact. So this well was at some point, the operator decided it was no longer economically viable to continue mining it, and they could actually walk away without changing it at all. Now let's see if it leaks. Try to concentrate a little better. The infrared camera helps us... we get a good image, an image in which we can visually see the leak.

Very obvious leak. Wow, definitely, you can see, it looks like there's smoke coming out, so... I mean, it could be a big methane leak. I assume this is a super emitter, which basically means it is emitting at a much higher rate than a typical well. Let's measure now... Oh wow, that's really tall! So I'm going to write down the high flow measured between four and eight liters per minute... I think sometimes wells that might be closer to people's homes if they are citizens submitting complaints to the DEP about wells on their property. These tend to get more attention.

In fact, the elementary school I attended had a well in the front yard. Actually? Yes. We would go out to the playground, sometimes the well would start, the pump would start working. I'm a reporter and editor for the Bradford Era. It's difficult to write about the industry because there are a very high number of people in this region who work in some capacity in the oil industry... So people in the area don't talk as much about the environmental impacts of drilling. or the environmental impacts of abandoned or orphaned wells. But during the time I worked at the newspaper, I remember three different houses exploding and burning due to natural gas or methane.

And knowing that there are so many - 397 in the city of Bradford - abandoned or orphaned wells... I was left very worried and thinking: Is this going to continue happening? The house was behind my house, about a block away. It was breakfast time. It was, I don't know, 7:15, 7:30, and I heard a kind of muffled noise. I ran out the kitchen door to the patio and could see the smoke already coming out of the burning house. I was a professional fire investigator at the time this incident occurred. Our tones for the fire department began to ring... Initially, I helped put out the fire before beginning my investigative duties.

The owner was very upset, but he suffered very few medical injuries. I am the fire chief of the Bradford Township Volunteer Fire Department. There were a couple sides of the house that were actually blown into the yard, there were windows, glass and screens blown into the yard. The investigation lasted months and Chief Burkhouse and I were at the house almost every day for about thirty days. We drilled holes in the basement foundation or cement floor and took air samples every day to check if any gas was still coming out of there. The more we investigated, we felt it had to have been some type of outside source that entered the basement of the house.

We keep looking for that. And then it was determined that it came from abandoned wells, a very, very short distance from the property. After the 2011 crash, Bradford residents tried to go about their daily lives. What they didn't know was that methane from other abandoned wells was still seeping into the ground. Until 2019, when another accident occurred a few kilometers away. Two weeks after that house exploded in the city of Allegany, it may have been caused by methane gas seeping through the ground. They were Ronald and Betty Jo Volz, they were the couple that lived, I think on West Branch Road in Allegany.

The people were not at home at the time of the explosion. If people had been home, they could have easily died. The house was completely destroyed. Many wells have been improperly sealed. Too often, follow-up is infrequent. Well structures deteriorate and oil companies are reluctant to pay repair and maintenance costs. The consequences of that have been fatal. It's a mountain, so you don't know

what

's beyond because you can't see. I didn't know they had facilities there. After the explosion, they found, I would say maybe 40 wells, that needed to be sealed or capped and cemented. And they discovered that they had 63 leaks.

Aliso Canyon was an oil field until the early 1970s, when SoCal Gas purchased the field and converted it to a gas storage facility. SS 25 was one of approximately 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 break. The leak was discovered on October 23, 2015 at 3:15 p.m. At noon on October 24, the first murder was attempted. The second assassination attempt took place on November 13. Now, it appeared to be a conventional well explosion. And the well continued to flow.

January 21, 2016. I smelled the gas in the morning when they left it for Lucas. I asked Jessica and she smelled it too. My headaches continue, including fatigue, and I feel disoriented all day. September 13, 2016. Lucas woke up at 3 in the morning with a stomachache. He had diarrhea, headache and a lot of nausea. Lucas had a bad day at school. The kids had rashes like little, little, I don't know, almost like blisters or I can't even describe it. A few months later, we started to notice that my hair was falling out and I was finding clumps of hair on my pillows.

So, it was strange. Deception, manipulation and lies. So when you find something bad... shove it under the rug. And that is all the pattern and practice of it. I am a doctor, doctor. People started complaining about all kinds of unusual symptoms at urgent care. Then they would come in and complain of a headache and a nosebleed or a rash or nausea and vomiting and diarrhea. And they had a combination of all of these symptoms, which was very different than people I had seen in the previous 25 years that I had done this. So it was like, well, what's going on?

So I kind of raised my eyebrows. The vector is a gas. It passes through the respiratory tract and then travels to the rest of the body. Everything is ex

pose

d. These people had been ex

pose

d to a variety of toxins. And even today we don't know all the toxins because the Department of Public Health and the Board of Supervisors didn't subpoena the list. This is the letter that I and other doctors from the Department of Public Health received. And you can see they're requesting, it says here "avoid performing any toxicology testing." "These are not recommended and are unlikely to provide useful data for clinical evaluation of patients..." So what did you decide to do?

Quite the opposite. We did a full evaluation and had it examined by a benzene investigator. And he made the statement in an email that this looks like chronic benzene exposure. They kept saying, well, it's just methane. But you know, it wasn't just that. Later we found out that crude oil was rising and raining on us. And they knew it. Many victims are bitter about the legal outcome of this environmental disaster. The SoCalGas company got its way only with an out-of-court settlement. Victims received an average of around 30,000 euros in many cases as compensation for life-changing injuries. The fight of the neighbors against the oil industry was that of the meek against the powerful.

But one woman has vowed to bring Big Oil to its knees. Livestock farmer Ashley Watt wants companies to be forced to take responsibility for her. I am a rancher and businesswoman. I really enjoy hurting people who have wronged me. And then Chevron has ruined my ranch. So now I'm not just looking for where else they went wrong on this ranch. I'm finding where they've gone wrong everywhere. My grandmother was born here. My mother was born here, as if she were my land. This is what's in my blood. Chevron made a mess and they should have to clean it up.

The wells were drilled long before the ranch owner inherited the land. Little by little his property has become a vacant lot. Today there are more than 130 abandoned wells spread across the plot. Hi Sara. Yeah, I'm at 122. Yeah, it's still like 50 PSI on the back and then they have a gauge on the long rope that's also at 50. It's against the rules, right? Well. I'll take a photo. I send you ok, goodbye. It's a Chevron well, but it hasn't produced in, I don't know, five years, ten years. Look, there's grass growing around it. So it hasn't produced. It's basically abandoned, but they haven't covered it up.

This indicator must be zero. And if you have pressure, that's very, very bad, it means something went wrong. I mean, 50 PSI is enough to kill someone. And if you came here, it could be like, if this happened one day, it would be like shooting water and oil into the air. Their battle against the company began in June 2021, when an old well suddenly began spouting brackish water. It was spraying salt water. And then they had to bring in offices and platforms and 50 people for weeks and weeks and weeks all over the place and they had to build this huge facility to plug this well.

The harmful brine had seeped into groundwater from normally impenetrable strata deep underground. The liquid also contained benzene and other chemical compounds. To avoid contamination and poisoning, the cattle had to be moved to another ranch. It took the company weeks to seal the leak. I think it's finally time to realize that yes, things are bad with old abandoned wells. And if it's actually going to be necessary to redo 100% of the wells, well, then you start talking about, you know, tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars in liabilities that no one is considering right now. So, yes, I think they are afraid.

I think if you start thinking that every well you drill, you're going to have to plug it not once, but five, ten times throughout your life. Yes. That starts to add up to a lot of money. Springsbubbly and brackish in an arid landscape. Those weren't there 70 years ago. It's a dead zone. There will never be anything growing there again. I mean, he'll be dead forever. I am the general manager of the Middle Pecos Groundwater Conservation District. There is a large, heavenly blue lake in the middle of the dry plains of Texas. But it is an environmental disaster, more than a tourist center.

The water is very salty. Surrounding it is methane and hydrogen sulfide, H-2-S or swamp gas, a deadly gas often found at oil and gas drilling sites. This is "Sloan Blair Number One." This is the Boehmer Lake well, and you can see it up here about 150 yards away, flowing, and it's flowing about 600 gallons per minute. It's tall and H-2-S. I am against the wind and the wind is at my back. So I feel pretty safe at this distance from here. I don't want to get any closer than this. Because those are the levels of H-2-S that we have seen in this well that are lethal.

If you inhale, staying in the breathing space for more than a few minutes could cause you to pass out. Ty Edwards has been fighting the oil industry regulatory agency in Texas, the Railroad Commission, for more than a decade. He refuses to seal the well, saying that what comes out is water instead of oil, so it is not his competition. When it comes to abandoned oil wells, it always comes down to one thing. It is expensive. The Railroad Commission goes and plugs a well on the list, the average cost is $5,000, $6,000, and they can go and plug 3 or 4,000 wells for $5,000 each.

Average costs for Lake Boemer? 20, 30, 40 million? Less than a kilometer from Lake Boehmer, another well has begun to leak, raising the threat of another huge toxic spill. More and more abandoned drilling sites are falling apart in this region. The locals have even given them a nickname. They call them “zombie pits.” In January 2022, a huge geyser appeared in this part of Texas. Here too, salt water flows from the depths of the subsoil. These accidents keep happening and problems accumulate with them, threatening endless ecological disaster. Raw materials are also exploited in the open sea. These drilling sites are also aging.

Look around. There are no fishing boats. There are no tourist boats. They can behave here because no one is watching them. And my feeling is that they really want to hide something. This Greenpeace ship has left the port of Hamburg for an expedition of several weeks. The mission: find old drilling sites and identify possible leaks. I am the unit head of the Oceans Department at Greenpeace Germany and have been working for Greenpeace since 1994. In the morning we launched the so-called side scan sonar. A sidescan sonar looks a bit like a fish and flies over the seafloor.

And our expert here, Jacob, is trying to find offshore industry structures on the seabed. There are 15,000 abandoned wells in the North Sea. Today the Esperanza explores the British exploitation sector, also in search of former platforms of the British company Mobil North Sea. The sector is one of five. The others belong to Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Norway. I am a marine biologist and ocean activist at Greenpeace in Germany. He was doing a little research on an explosion in 1990. And our explosion is something, it must be something, here in the UK sector in the heyday of Aberdeen.

What I found strange is that they stopped the observation more than 22 years ago. So they didn't care anymore, did they? They said at that time that they have the feeling that it is no longer dangerous and they have the feeling that the amount of gas is so small that they can stop the observation. Wow, amazing, wow, very good. I'm super happy and surprised at the same time. Watch this. Yes, we are very sad but we are happy. This is really amazing. So we are at the epicenter of this methane leak that has been known for 30 years and that has evidently not stopped emitting methane gas, which is a very powerful greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

The methane bubbles to the surface and is emitted into the atmosphere. It is 28 times more harmful than another greenhouse gas, CO2. It's a big scandal. Let's be honest. I mean, it takes people decades, you know, 30 years, we're talking now, and no one cares or takes responsibility to close this leak and monitor it. Mobil North Sea was directly involved in the drilling. To date they have done nothing about this leak. And also the British government, which was given, say, the area or the license to drill there, has not done anything about it. In the North Sea, most of these wells are abandoned or were dry wells.

I work at the Geomar Center for Ocean Research in Kiel. Geomar is one of the largest marine institutes in Europe. During all the expeditions we were able to dive with a robot in three wells to quantify methane emissions. What we see here is a 3D view of the top thousand meters of the seafloor in the North Sea. The black lines you see are drilled wells and the colored spots you see are the gas accumulations mapped in these upper thousand meters. And they accidentally punctured one of these shallow gas pockets. And here, with this red block, for example, we see that these two wells, these black lines, were drilled through this accumulation of gas.

So the main conclusion from our estimates of methane emissions from abandoned wells in the North Sea is that this is the dominant methane input. Here we have between 20 and perhaps 30 kilotons per year of methane reaching the North Sea from these abandoned wells... It was not known because there was nothing published until now. But when we talked to some of the oil and gas companies afterwards, it became clear that they actually know that problem quite well. -Actually? -Yeah. In the United States, Clark Williams-Derry has closely followed the oil industry's strategy regarding old wells. My job title is energy finance analyst.

What motivates me is almost like being a detective when you're gathering information from many sources because the industry has been very good at delaying or evading its cleanup responsibility. Since the 1950s, oil and gas companies have been required by law to seal abandoned wells immediately. Some companies have found a way around this. They declare the wells "inactive" instead of abandoning them. And I'm going to look around in Bakersfield, where we are now. Just north of the city is a large oil producing area. And these purple dots are all inactive wells. So California itself has about 36,000 inactive wells.

Inactive wells are wells that have not been used for production for at least two years, oil and gas production. This is from the state's list of inactive wells. If we wanted to, we could, you know, just for fun, just take a look at them and sort them. Here is one that has been dormant for 118 years. 65 years, 62 years, 45 years, like some of them have been dormant longer than I've been alive. One of the reasons I'm interested in inactive wells is that... there's a real

risk

that there won't be enough money left to clean them all up. What if this is deliberate?

And what would happen if certain companies intentionally ensured that there was not enough money left to properly seal their wells? Clark Williams-Derry has begun investigating the business of a multinational called Occidental Petroleum. The company originally owned more than 8,000 inactive boreholes in the region. But a few years ago, the company split up and put all of its old wells under the ownership of another company, the California Resources Corporation, CRC. So this, this well is number 301 in section 23. The operator is California Resources Corporation. So this well hasn't produced anything in the last five years, at least according to the records we have.

So, in theory, all of these wells will have to be plugged one day. A black ring in the ground surrounds the well. But how big is the leak below? And when will this well be sealed? I think the industry's strategy has been to some extent and in some cases to isolate these low-producing wells to companies that don't have the resources to pay for the cleanup. In reality, what the CRC operation is is essentially a declining resource. It has more and more idle wells in its inventory and is producing less and less oil. So over time, what I expect to happen is that there will be more and more inactive wells, fewer and fewer productive wells, and increasing liability.

And you may eventually not have the resources to pay for the cleanup. More and more developments are being built east of Bakersfield. A promotional video says it's a great place, ideal for families. But do potential buyers know that these homes are next to a graveyard of oil wells, and a dangerous one at that? California authorities have required the sealing of old wells since 2017, until that year a company called “Sunray” worked here. Let's take a look. This is Bloemer Well 123. Owned by Sunray Petroleum. And if you listen... Come here, listen. You can hear something. You can smell something.

Methane is odorless but I can smell something. But do you hear that sound? That little whistle. It has been dormant for years. There has been no activity in this regard. But something is happening here. You can see there's just some tape here. Just some duct tape. Alright. So I guess I really feel a little sick about that. I don't know what's going on... Hey, Audrey, it's Clark. After our visit, I gathered some local environmental groups and the state sent some inspectors to check. The state found 21 inactive wells leaking methane. Nine at concentrations that were high enough to be potentially explosive.

So the good news is that the state has started plugging some of the wells. But I guess the bad news is that the problem is much more widespread than the leaky well we found.