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Meet The Retired Oil Exec Plugging Forgotten Wells To Reduce Emissions | World Wide Waste
Meet The Retired Oil Exec Plugging Forgotten Wells To Reduce Emissions | World Wide Waste
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0:04
Narrator: This crew is plugging an old oil well.
0:08
It no longer has an owner, and it was never properly sealed.
0:13
So for decades, it's been sitting here,
0:15
pumping out environmental toxins unchecked.
0:20
This is what's called an orphan well.
0:22
Curtis: You can actually smell the methane gas.
0:26
Narrator: And some of the stuff it leaks out
0:27
can poison us.
0:29
Ira: Benzene or xylene.
0:31
We know they're carcinogenic.
0:33
Narrator: Across America, there are an estimated
0:36
1 million orphan oil and gas wells.
0:39
That's like having an extra 2.5 million cars
0:42
on the road every year.
0:46
Plugging them would stop any leaks
0:48
and could help in our fight against rising methane levels.
0:51
Adam: This is some low-hanging fruit.
0:53
There's no other ways to abate these emissions
0:55
other than to plug these wells.
0:57
Narrator: But the problem is
0:58
we don't always know where they are.
1:07
Narrator: They've been discovered
1:08
under houses and schools.
1:10
And even in people's front yards.
1:12
This has really been everyone's dirty little secret.
1:15
Narrator: So who's responsible for cleaning up this mess,
1:19
and who's actually doing it?
1:26
Nowadays, when companies are done with a well,
1:29
they're required by law to plug it,
1:31
essentially fill it with cement
1:32
before abandoning it.
1:35
But Americans have been drilling for oil for over 150 years.
1:39
Before there were any regulations of any kind.
1:42
Narrator: So many early operators
1:43
before 1950 would simply fill the holes
1:45
with sand, cannonballs, or trash.
1:48
Throwing down telephone poles, rags, trash, whatever,
1:53
just to jam it up.
1:54
Narrator: Curtis Shuck is a retired oil exec.
1:57
For the last three years,
1:58
he's been plugging wells across the country
2:00
with his nonprofit, the Well Done Foundation.
2:05
We joined him on a well hunt in Louisiana.
2:07
Here, he found an orphaned one right next to the bayou.
2:14
If you didn't know what you were looking for,
2:16
it'd be easy to miss.
2:18
Curtis: Look at this crazy beautiful ecosystem
2:21
that is right next to this legacy well here.
2:26
This water inundates this whole area. This goes underwater.
2:31
And because the casing integrity has been compromised,
2:35
it starts to bubble gas up around it.
2:41
Narrator: Today, it's harder
2:42
for a well to become orphaned,
2:44
but it still happens,
2:45
especially when there are downturns in the oil industry.
2:50
Usually it's because operators have gone bankrupt.
2:52
Adam: So there's no responsible party left to plug the well.
2:57
So they fall to the state.
2:58
They become a ward of the state.
3:00
Narrator: Similar to an orphan child.
3:03
And states often don't have the funds
3:05
to keep plugging them all.
3:07
Curtis: I just couldn't believe my eyes that, you know,
3:09
in any universe, it would be OK
3:12
to leave something like that behind, to walk away.
3:20
Narrator: To plug these wells,
3:21
Curtis hires local guys that work
3:23
in the oil industry. And they use the same gear to plug wells
3:27
as they do to drill them.
3:38
Narrator: His team's plugging 75 wells in Louisiana
3:41
over the next few years, like this one in Caddo Parish.
3:46
It's typically a two-day process,
3:48
beginning with the tubing that runs the depth of the well.
4:07
Narrator: This well is about 4,000 feet deep.
4:12
So Terrence and his crew will spend most
4:14
of the day pulling out and stacking pipe.
4:18
Usually, the pipes won't go to waste.
4:25
Narrator: The next day, the crew returns
4:26
to plug the well.
4:28
First, they have to flush down high-pressure water to clean
4:31
out the hole.
4:33
Then they add cement.
4:43
Curtis: We've got cement to the surface.
4:44
The methane emissions have been stopped.
4:48
Narrator: They cut the well off 3 feet
4:50
below the surface.
4:52
We'll weld the monument cap on the top,
4:55
and then we'll restore the surface area
4:59
like we were never even here.
5:07
Narrator: But plugging is expensive.
5:09
If you don't have the money to plug it on your own,
5:11
you better learn to like looking at it.
5:13
Narrator: It can start at $30,000
5:17
and go up to as much
5:18
as $1 million per well,
5:19
depending on the geology.
5:21
Landowner Hunter Lawler planned to foot the bill himself
5:25
until Curtis adopted this well.
5:27
Well Done pays for its pluggings with donations
5:30
and carbon credits.
5:32
Because you really wouldn't want an orphan well
5:34
anywhere near where you live.
5:37
They can contaminate groundwater
5:39
and leak oil and salt,
5:40
which create environmental dead zones.
5:44
Mary: There have been wells
5:45
that have buildings built around them,
5:49
and there have been explosions.
5:51
Narrator: The methane wells leak out
5:53
is not only 84 times more potent than CO2,
5:56
it's also flammable.
5:59
Two dozen people were injured in 1985
6:02
when a Ross Dress for Less store blew up in LA.
6:06
It was sitting on an abandoned well leaking methane.
6:09
Smaller explosions have also happened
6:11
in nearby Marina del Rey, Colorado, and Pennsylvania.
6:18
Wells can also leak out carcinogenic or even deadly gases.
6:22
Adam: Around 9 million people live
6:24
within a mile of one of these wells in the US.
6:27
Narrator: A well that's properly plugged
6:29
will stop leaking methane,
6:31
except we don't know where to find all these orphan wells.
6:34
So they could be releasing all this bad stuff,
6:37
and no one would know.
6:40
Sometimes, all that marks a century-old wellbore
6:43
is a tiny pipe or a well casing,
6:45
which nature can swallow up over time.
6:49
To start trying to locate them all,
6:51
Adam and Mary use state data to develop this map.
6:54
So far, they've recorded 81,000 documented wells
6:57
and identified hotspots
6:59
in the South, Appalachia, and California.
7:02
But that just scratches the surface.
7:05
There's probably hundreds of thousands
7:07
of undocumented orphan wells
7:09
that we just don't know where they are.
7:11
We don't have records.
7:13
Narrator: Curtis and his team
7:13
have focused on Louisiana since 2021.
7:16
Curtis: This has been a huge part of this economy.
7:19
Little wells in people's front yards.
7:25
Narrator: He first starts
7:26
in state databases to get a general location of a well.
7:29
Curtis: Oftentimes, the coordinates
7:31
of a well are not, you know, they're very approximate.
7:37
It's a ground game. Probably walk about, you know,
7:40
anywhere from 5 to 10 miles a day.
7:43
Narrator: That's what he calls wildcatting.
7:47
Then he has to determine
7:49
if the well is a super-emitter,
7:52
emitting more than 22 pounds of methane an hour.
7:58
That's the case with one he found
7:59
in the woods behind someone's house.
8:03
This well is particularly bad.
8:07
You can actually hear the methane coming out.
8:10
Curtis: Yeah. Isn't that crazy?
8:18
Curtis: What it's telling you is
8:19
that it's over the exposure level.
8:26
Narrator: And on this camera, you can see the methane.
8:30
But the man living on the property had no idea it was here.
8:33
Curtis: How are you, sir?
8:36
Curtis: We're working on this orphan well here.
8:39
Have you seen this one before?
8:41
I didn't know that was there.
8:44
Curtis: Here, come and check this one out.
8:45
Check this out.
8:48
Can you hear that?
8:50
Chris: Oh yeah. Curtis: Yeah.
8:54
Narrator: Curtis adopted this well and will plug it just
8:56
like he did with the one up the road.
8:59
But even after it's been properly closed,
9:01
there's no guarantee a well will stay that way.
9:04
Across the country in California,
9:07
earthquakes can reopen plugged wells.
9:10
Wells that are drilled through faults are going
9:13
to be impossible to permanently seal.
9:18
Narrator: Ira Leifer runs Bubbleology,
9:20
a company that measures air pollution
9:22
to hunt down the biggest leaks.
9:24
He installed a bunch
9:25
of air-monitoring instruments on his truck, SISTER2.
9:28
It has ...
9:29
Ira: A greenhouse-gas analyzer, ozone, nitrogen oxides.
9:34
We have one GPS directly at this point.
9:38
If you don't know where you are,
9:39
you really don't know anything.
9:41
That's both philosophically true as well as scientifically.
9:44
This gives a picture of the atmosphere above us
9:47
as we drive.
9:48
Narrator: Ira says his monitors are so sensitive ...
9:50
Ira: We're able to see really small plumes, even miles distant.
9:56
Narrator: As he drives around,
9:57
he picks up plumes
9:58
from abandoned wells throughout Southern California,
10:00
like under homes in fancy La Brea, or here in Kern River.
10:05
Ira: Right now, we're once again
10:07
in areas of active oil production on all sides.
10:11
We see elevated methane.
10:14
Narrator: When his instruments pick up a plume,
10:15
he pulls over and takes an air sample.
10:21
Ira: When we're ready to collect the sample,
10:23
we crack this here just a little bit.
10:28
It's not filling too fast.
10:29
So today on our pass, we saw 14 ppm methane.
10:35
That actually is one
10:36
of the highest values that we've seen on land.
10:40
Narrator: Ira then passes his findings
10:42
to colleagues at California government agencies.
10:46
So what is the government doing about it all?
10:48
Well, for the most part, it's left to the states to deal
10:51
with the problem.
10:52
Most states launched plugging programs
10:54
in the '80s and '90s
10:55
and have since sealed thousands of wells.
10:58
But those programs have barely made a dent.
11:01
Pennsylvania alone still
11:02
has an estimated 200,000 unplugged orphan wells.
11:06
Curtis: States were woefully underfunded to address this project.
11:12
Narrator: So in 2021, Sen. Ben Ray Luján
11:15
from New Mexico and Sen. Kevin Cramer
11:17
from North Dakota introduced the REGROW Act
11:20
to address this problem on a federal level.
11:23
It passed with the infrastructure bill signed
11:25
by President Biden the same year
11:27
and earmarked $4.7 billion for well pluggings.
11:31
Luján: We're going to see funding go
11:32
to the states where we know that there's probably the most
11:35
orphan oil and gas wells across the country.
11:37
Narrator: The money will also get distributed
11:39
to the Department of Interior
11:40
to plug wells on federal lands.
11:43
An allocation specific to orphaned
11:45
and abandoned oil and gas wells
11:47
on tribal communities and pueblos.
11:48
Narrator: Even if it all goes perfectly, though,
11:50
the act will only address documented wells.
11:54
And that's less than a fifth
11:55
of the orphaned wells that might be out there.
11:58
Ira: It's a tiny down payment on bringing our infrastructure
12:04
to where it should have been 10 years ago.
12:06
I'm not saying it's not enough,
12:11
but it's not enough.
12:15
Narrator: In the last seven years,
12:16
hundreds of oil and gas producers have declared bankruptcy.
12:20
So as these companies struggle,
12:22
more oil and gas wells will go idle.
12:25
And as we wean off gas and oil for more renewable energy ...
12:28
Ira: Millions of wells are going to be abandoned
12:31
in the next couple years, so this is a serious problem.
12:35
Narrator: One solution is to get the oil
12:37
and gas industry to front more of the bill.
12:39
So that the cost doesn't have to be borne by the taxpayer.
12:42
Narrator: But Ira says
12:43
we can't put all the blame on drillers.
12:46
Ira: The reality is we want to live a life
12:50
where we don't shiver all winter,
12:54
to live in a place where we can move around
12:57
with cars and airplanes.
13:03
This all requires petroleum.
13:06
Narrator: So while we're still dependent on oil,
13:08
Curtis and his team will keep plugging away —
13:10
one well at a time.
13:15
Curtis: We keep getting further and further behind.
13:19
It's time to stop talking.
13:21
It's time to roll up our sleeves and get to work.
Meet The Retired Oil Exec Plugging Forgotten Wells To Reduce Emissions | World Wide Waste - Video học tiếng Anh
