{"id":169044,"date":"2020-09-21T12:00:29","date_gmt":"2020-09-21T11:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=169044"},"modified":"2020-09-19T08:48:42","modified_gmt":"2020-09-19T07:48:42","slug":"gas-companies-are-abandoning-their-wells-leaving-them-to-leak-methane-forever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/09\/gas-companies-are-abandoning-their-wells-leaving-them-to-leak-methane-forever\/","title":{"rendered":"Gas Companies Are Abandoning Their Wells, Leaving Them to Leak Methane Forever"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Just one orphaned site in California could have emitted more than 30 tons of methane. There are millions more like it.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Gas well No. 095-20708, 4 miles north of Rio Vista, Calif., in 2017.
Photographer: Lisa Vielst\u00e4dte<\/p><\/div>\n

17 Sep 2020 – <\/em>The story of gas well No.\u2009095-20708 begins on Nov. 10, 1984, when a drill bit broke the Earth\u2019s surface 4 miles north of Rio Vista, Calif. Wells don\u2019t have birthdays, so this was its \u201cspud date.\u201d<\/p>\n

The drill chewed through the dirt at a rate of 80 \u00bd feet per hour, reaching 846 feet below ground that first day. By Thanksgiving it had gotten a mile down, finally stopping 49 days later, having laid 2.2 miles of steel pipe and cement on its way to the \u201cpay zone,\u201d an underground field containing millions of dollars\u2019 worth of natural gas.<\/p>\n

It was ready to start pumping two months later, in early January. While 1985 started out as a good year for gas, by its close, more than half the nation\u2019s oil and gas wells had shut down. How much money the Amerada Hess Corp., which bankrolled the dig, managed to pump out of gas well No.\u2009095-20708 before that bust isn\u2019t known. By 1990 the company, now called simply Hess Corp., gave up and sold it. Over the next decade or so, four more companies would seek the riches promised at the bottom of the well, seemingly with little success. In 2001 a state inspector visited the site. \u201cLooks like it\u2019s dying,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

Gas wells never really die, though. Over the years, the miles of steel piping and cement corrode, creating pathways for noxious gases to reach the surface. The most worrisome of these is methane, the main component of natural gas. If carbon dioxide is a bullet, methane is a bomb. Odorless and invisible, it captures 86 times more heat than CO\u2082 over two decades and at least 25 times more over a century. Drilling has released this potent greenhouse gas<\/a>, once sequestered in the deep pockets and grooves of the Earth, into the atmosphere, where it\u2019s wreaking more havoc than humans can keep up with<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Gas well No. 095-20708 under \u201ctent chamber\u201d for testing.<\/strong><\/div>\n
Photographer: Eric Lebel<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Well No.\u2009095-20708 is also known as A.H.C. Church No.\u200911, referring both to Hess and to Bernard Church, who like so many in California\u2019s Sacramento River Delta sold his farmland but retained the mineral rights in the hope that they\u2019d make his family rich. The Church well is a relic, but it\u2019s not rare. It\u2019s one of more than 3.2 million deserted oil and gas wells in the U.S. and one of an estimated 29 million globally, according to Reuters<\/a>. There\u2019s no regulatory requirement to monitor methane emissions from inactive wells, and until recently, scientists didn\u2019t even consider wells in their estimates of greenhouse gas emissions. With the pandemic depressing demand for fossil fuels and renewable energy development booming, why should owners idle or plug their wells when they can simply walk away?<\/p>\n

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\u00a0In the past five years, 207 oil and gas businesses have failed. As natural gas prices crater, the fiscal burden on states forced to plug wells could skyrocket; according to Rystad Energy AS, an industry analytics company, 190 more companies could file for bankruptcy by the end of 2022. Many oil and gas companies are idling their wells by capping them in the hope prices will rise again. But capping lasts only about two decades, and it does nothing to prevent tens of thousands of low-producing wells from becoming orphaned, meaning \u201cthere is no associated person or company with any financial connection to and responsibility for the well,\u201d according to California\u2019s Geologic Energy Management Division.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s cheaper to idle them than to clean them up,\u201d says Joshua Macey, an assistant professor of law at the University of Chicago, who\u2019s spent years studying fossil fuel bankruptcies. \u201cOnce prices increase, they could be profitable to operate again. It gives them a strong reason to not do cleanup now. It\u2019s not orphaned yet, although for all intents and purposes it is.\u201d<\/p>\n