A knee-high pipe sticking out of the ground not far from a school. A gurgle in a pond on rolling farmland. A patch of forest undergrowth hiding a long-forgotten, leaking oil well.
Relics like these dot the country from California to Pennsylvania: unused, unplugged oil and gas wells. They're called orphan wells. They should have been plugged when their useful life was over. But many weren't.
These unplugged wells can leak oil, natural gas and toxins into waterways and air. Because natural gas, also known as methane, is a potent greenhouse gas, these wells are adding to climate change.
And nobody knows how many are out there.
It is entirely possible that we have a million or more undocumented wells in the United States, says Mary Kang, an associate professor at McGill University who has extensively researched methane emissions from these old wells.
This old problem is attracting new scrutiny, and a .
Step one: Figuring out where they are.
Hunting for orphans
Last spring, Dan Arthur, a petroleum engineer and geologist, stepped carefully through Oklahoma prairie grasses to examine a capped pipe sticking out of the ground. An entourage followed: Arthur's stepson, an 91福利 reporter, a photographer, and one of Arthur's employees with an expensive camera that could detect gas leaks.
Arthur's an oil guy. He loves the view of pumpjacks scattered over the prairie, the oil pumps that bob up and down across the horizon like strange, skinny birds pecking at the ground in slow motion. But to him, orphan wells are a serious problem 鈥� and they're a lot less visible than those pumpjacks. A lot of people don't see them, Arthur says with frustration.
And if you don't see them, you don't even know there's a problem there to fix.
Finding them is kind of like hunting for fossils, another hobby of Arthur's. Some people take their friends fishing, he said, standing in Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Osage County and gazing out on a stormy horizon. I'll go, 'Let's go hunt for dinosaurs.' You know, 'Let's go hunt for orphan wells.'
More than 100,000 orphan wells have been , but everyone in the industry knows the problem is . Arthur and his stepsons have found wells in the middle of the Arkansas River in Tulsa, actively leaking pollutants into the river. They've found old wells in urban parks.
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Some orphan wells were drilled and abandoned in the early days of the oil industry, before modern techniques for plugging defunct wells were developed, let alone required. And that helps explain why they'd be missing from maps.
Or, as Arthur put it, with exaggerated skepticism: You think all these early wells in Osage, when they were drilling, had permits?
The history of oil development in Osage Nation is long and violent. A hundred years ago, as oil boomed, white people murdered many members of the tribe to steal their oil wealth 鈥� maybe you saw Killers of the Flower Moon.
A few of the wells drilled during that bloody string of murders are still pumping today. Others are relics, left unplugged.
This problem spans the nation. There were early oil booms in Appalachia, California and Texas, and they too left a legacy of unplugged, undocumented wells.
Most people don't look for these wells on spring break, like Arthur and his stepsons 鈥� but lots of groups are hunting for them. is working with state regulators and tribal groups (including the Osage Nation), as well as and to map more orphan wells.
That means looking at historical photos, applying machine learning to old oil records, attaching magnetometers to drones, using aerial photography, and, of course, going out into the field to look in person.
We're finding more and more every single day, says Craig Walker, of the Department of Natural Resources for the Osage Nation.
It's unplugged. But is it orphaned?
Not all orphan wells are old 鈥� and putting a pin in a map isn't always the end of the story.
Take the waist-high, capped pipe that Arthur was examining, surrounded by pristine prairie and bison dung. Arthur said it could be an orphan well 鈥� We don't really know.
It definitely wasn't drilled a century ago. It was, in fact, drilled in recent memory.
That was one of my favorites, says Shane Matson, the geologist and former oilman who drilled the now-idled well in the early 2010s. It was a spectacular, very fascinating well.
But, thanks in part to a market crash, the well was never profitable to run. Matson sold the well to a former business partner a decade ago. Then that partner sold it, too, Matson says.
So who's responsible for plugging the well? The Osage Nation's records indicate the well is potentially orphaned, and may be investigated to determine whether it should be formally categorized as such. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, which administers the oil and gas leases in Osage County, maintains Matson's company is still responsible for plugging it. Matson says that company was bought by another, along with all of its assets, and doesn't even exist as its own entity any more.
It's not an unusual situation. In many cases, responsibility for orphan wells gets passed along like a hot potato.
That's because an unprofitable well is very expensive to close properly. It's much cheaper to put a small cap on top as a short-term solution.
Such a well 鈥� capped, but not permanently plugged 鈥� can be sold from one company to another. That can end two ways: A company, usually under pressure from regulators, finally agrees to plug the well. Or it goes bankrupt and the well is orphaned. Now, plugging it is up to the government.
And there's another wrinkle. Before actually plugging an orphan well, the Osage would also need to confirm that the well wouldn't be better off being reopened as a source of oil.
If it's potentially economically viable for the Osage Nation, we cannot plug it, says Walker, of the Osage Department of Natural Resources.
The costs of inaction
On a hillside in Osage County, Arthur's employee Dan Caldwell sets up an optical gas imaging camera, an expensive machine that makes invisible gas leaks visible. The nearby wells look good. But they're connected to some old tanks. I think there's a plume, Caldwell says, and zooms in.
Arthur steps over to take a look. The view through the camera is disorienting, a pixelated grayscale landscape. But there it is: a little stream of planet-warming gases, rising up into the air.
Old oil and gas wells are not the top source of methane. Agriculture, landfills and active oil and gas production are all bigger offenders. And it's tricky to calculate the climate effects, because there's huge variation in how much wells leak; some release a lot of methane, others none at all. But it's not negligible. According to , old oil wells as a whole (including orphan wells) have a bigger climate footprint than all the motorcycles in the country.
And orphan wells are a particularly odious source of the pollution because they provide no societal benefit at all. They are not a source of food or energy. They don't even make anybody money any more.
Methane isn't the only risk; there are other chemicals like hydrogen sulfide that can work up from underground. These wells can impact people, the environment, groundwater, surface water, soils 鈥� all these different things over time, Dan Arthur says.
Will there be more orphans?
Finding the perhaps one million existing orphan wells is a daunting enough challenge.
But Adam Peltz, of the Environmental Defense Fund, says they are only half the problem. We have a million active wells that all eventually need to be plugged 鈥� and in the absence of policy change, a lot of them will become orphan too, he says.
That's because right now, companies have to keep wells open as long as possible, even if they aren't being used. Wells at the end of their lifespan are often sold to other companies, whether small operators or , that specialize in older . A tiny dribble of oil from those wells can still be profitable. Or owners might let wells lie dormant, arguing they might have economic potential in the future.
But that increases the risks that some of these companies, particularly the smaller ones, will go bankrupt with unplugged wells on their books. Then they become the taxpayers' problem.
There are rules 鈥� state, tribal, and federal 鈥� that are meant to prevent this from happening. But in many cases those rules have either been too weak or too easily skirted, and orphan wells continue to be created.
And making the rules stricter would add costs for oil producers. The oil industry against such changes, arguing any state that adopts them would drive producers to friendlier regions, causing a blow to state coffers.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs sums up the dilemma from an oil regulator's perspective: The regulation necessary to eliminate the possibility of orphan wells would be tantamount to a prohibition on development of Osage oil, the agency wrote to 91福利 last year.
But many advocates are hopeful that states and the federal government could make real progress. Peltz starts rattling off things that could help: Government regulators could require companies to put up more money in the form of surety bonds that will help cover plugging costs if they go bankrupt. Or make it harder for companies to keep non-producing wells open for years at a time. Or collect more money from the oil industry as a whole to cover orphan well plugging costs, rather than relying on taxpayers to foot the bill.
Many states, he says, are working on approaches like this, to hold the industry accountable for the cost of closing wells and avoid creating more orphans. He points to recent changes in and as examples. There is no justification for orphaning wells, he says.
Despite challenges, the map is getting filled in
A few years ago Mary Kang, of McGill University, tracked a 50% increase in how many wells had been documented in the U.S. over just six months. She attributes the increase to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which passed in 2021 and included $4.7 billion in funding for plugging those orphan wells 鈥� both creating an incentive for states to map them, and providing resources for the effort.
Before using funds to plug wells, the states had to submit the numbers of orphan wells that they have in their state, she says. So that increase has a lot to do with states actually taking the time and effort 鈥� to document wells that they know of or improving their databases.
The well-plugging program was launched under the Biden administration. Some of that funding is currently frozen, but the Department of the Interior tells 91福利 via email that it is currently reviewing state applications for some grant funding and plans to open others after a policy review. In the meantime, more than a billion dollars have already been awarded.
That federal money has already been transformative. But how far will $4.7 billion go toward actually plugging wells?
Oh, it's not enough, Kang says, immediately.
That's because once they're found, fixing them is pricey. They have to be examined, cleaned up and carefully filled with cement. I have spent as low as $20,000 and as high as $300,000, says Everett Waller, the former chair of the Osage Minerals Council.
Before the current federal funding existed, Waller led an effort to plug orphan wells on the tribe's land. At the time, the tribe knew of about 1,600. With a budget of $19 million, Waller managed to plug just 85.
That's a microcosm of the trend nationwide. Every attempt to plug orphan wells has been dwarfed by the size of the problem.
But Waller, who says he's the only chairman of the Osage Minerals Council who saw more wells plugged than drilled on tribal lands, says that giving up is not an option.
I don't want my children to have to live through things that I can fix, he says.
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