[The Gulf of Mexico is littered with tens of thousands of
abandoned oil and gas wells, and toothless regulation leaves climate
warming gas emissions unchecked. ] [[link removed]]

UNPLUGGED: ABANDONED OIL AND GAS WELLS LEAVE THE OCEAN FLOOR SPEWING
METHANE  
[[link removed]]


 

Hannah Seo
December 8, 2020
Environmental Health News
[[link removed]]


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_ The Gulf of Mexico is littered with tens of thousands of abandoned
oil and gas wells, and toothless regulation leaves climate warming gas
emissions unchecked. _

Locations of existing oil and gas infrastructure in U.S. Gulf of
Mexico territory, 2017., Deepwater Oil and Gas Production in the Gulf
of Mexico and Related Global Trends

 

Out on the deck of a research boat, Tara Yacovitch looked out to the
water. In the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, the seascape is peppered
with lights. And every light is part of an offshore oil or gas
platform.

Offshore platforms can vary greatly in size—some are as big as
multi-storied buildings, while others resemble small but very tall
rooms. The boat carrying Yacovitch and her team also housed a variety
of science equipment: methane isotope readers, spectrometers, and
other tools to measure methane levels in the air around these sites.

Yacovitch [[link removed]],
an instrument scientist at Aerodyne Research, is trying to understand
the scope of what some scientists say is a massive environmental issue
lurking below our seas. Wells are routinely drilled into the sea floor
for oil and gas production, and abandoned when they stop being
economically viable—sometimes this is after years of oil or gas
extraction, sometimes it's part way through drilling before the well
is even finished. But not all of these wells are plugged and properly
maintained before being left behind. The result: methane and other
gases leaking in unknown quantities for years on end from tens of
thousands of holes in the ocean floor.

The harms for the ocean and its inhabitants, and the atmosphere above,
are largely unknown. But we do know that methane is about 84 times
more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, measured over a
20-year period, according to the United Nations Economic Commission
for Europe
[[link removed]].

An EHN analysis of federal data on oil and natural gas wells found
there are 55,315 offshore in U.S. federal waters, 53,724 (97 percent)
of which are in the Gulf of Mexico, according to data
[[link removed]] from the Bureau of Ocean
Energy Management (BOEM) and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental
Enforcement (BSEE), as of November 30, 2020.

Of those wells, 28,232, or 52.6 percent, are permanently abandoned or
decommissioned. 3,444, or 6.4 percent are temporarily abandoned. And
those are only in the U.S., and in federal waters alone. Individual
state governments tally and record the offshore wells located in their
own waters—and that data is kept separate.

Research in other offshore environments from the North Sea in Europe
to the Bohai Sea in China indicate a global trend, but EHN focused on
the Gulf of Mexico, since that is where the majority of oil and gas
drilling occurs in the U.S., and subsequently where the majority of
data and research has been collected.

While active oil and gas wells can also be prone to leakage, leaks
from decommissioned and abandoned wells are more pernicious. Though
all wells are supposed to be plugged before they are abandoned and
decommissioned, the state of those plugs post-abandonment is not
monitored. Abandoned wells number in the tens of thousands, with
abandonment rates increasing yearly.

A well could be active for years, even decades, but an abandoned well
that has not been properly plugged could leak methane and other
harmful gases in perpetuity. Beyond methane, benzene
[[link removed]], nitrogen oxides
[[link removed]], carbon
dioxide
[[link removed]]
and more all have all been detected in oil and gas well emissions.

Experts say federal oversight and regulation remain inadequate,
allowing industry to continually add to the well count without
properly documenting crucial site details. Records on the locations,
longevity, and emission volumes for wells are incomplete, but
emissions from these sites undoubtedly impact ocean ecology—and some
of this methane inevitably gets released into the atmosphere.

Regulatory holes
Offshore oil and gas production in the U.S. began in the early 20th
century
[[link removed]],
with production in the Gulf of Mexico beginning in the late 1930s. It
was not until 1982, however, that the government created the Minerals
Management Service (MMS) and passed the Federal Oil & Gas Royalty
Management Act
[[link removed]],
requiring recordkeeping for where and when wells were drilled, and to
whom they were sold.

In 2010, MMS split into what would become BOEM, BSEE, and the Office
of Natural Resources Revenue. All U.S. federal waters are now leased
out by BOEM, and all wells and platforms are monitored and regulated
by BSEE.

Once leases are finalized, companies can drill exploration wells—the
initial boreholes used to determine whether an area will be
profitable.

And what that exploratory well looks like depends on the geology of
where you're drilling. "In offshore environments it can be thousands,
maybe even 20,000 or 30,000 feet underwater. And how far into the
ocean floor you drill will again just depend on that geology," Wesley
Williams [[link removed]],
an engineer at Louisiana State University, told EHN

In the early days, companies drilled exploration wells with little to
no concern, Williams said—"there's some areas where we joke that
it's like Swiss cheese." But now, regulators are more scrupulous.

As they drill, whether exploratory or not, companies consistently
check for economic viability, Williams said. When that economic
viability tips over to red, the owners either sell or decommission.

But what is considered "economically viable" differs from company to
company. Leases and rights to drill at one site may pass through
multiple companies over the years. Once a well stops generating
interest or profit potential, it is decommissioned.

_Related:_ _Oil and gas methane emissions in US are at least 15%
higher than we thought_
[[link removed]]

Every well is supposed to be decommissioned when no longer active in
concordance with federal law. Platforms at the surface are supposed to
be removed, and boreholes in the ocean floor need to be plugged with
cement or a similar material. But not every well is decommissioned
properly. Sometimes, especially if the parent company goes out of
business, they are simply orphaned, left to idle and leak until the
government handles plugging.

Erik Milito, president of National Ocean Industries Association wrote
EHN in an email: "Between Federal plugging and abandonment
regulations, which require the installation and testing of barriers,
and the natural tendencies of methane, the likelihood of methane
emissions escaping from oil and gas activities on the sea floor is
extremely low."

Sandy Day, BSEE's press secretary wrote EHN in an email that "BSEE
inspects all offshore facilities at least once per year; and inspects
drilling rigs at least once per month. BSEE conducts pollution
surveillance and offshore site-specific inspections using helicopters
flying from district office locations around the Outer Continental
Shelf." Day did not address how they monitor abandoned or orphaned
wells, specifically.

But federal policies for these wells are "difficult to administer and
it's easy to evade," Megan Milliken Biven
[[link removed]], an energy policy
researcher and former BOEM employee, told EHN. And these agencies'
policies are basically all "beyond the scope and capability of the
resources the agency has."

She added that most of these agencies' "due diligence" safety
evaluations are more about giving themselves a pass than actually
discerning risk. BOEM has a guidebook to evaluate the environmental
impact of any drilling operation, "and I would say that that document
doesn't exist to actually remove or mitigate any kind of risk. It's
only to state the risk so that when someone tries to sue the agency,
they can say, 'look, we looked at the risk.'"

Milliken Biven also said that it's hard to define what holes there are
in the system, because "that assumes that there is a standard for
plugging and abandonment, that assumes that there is a standard for
checking for leaks, that assumes that there is a standard for site
clearance and restoration...but there is none."

“Super-emitters” and the undocumented 
The Global Methane Initiative
[[link removed]], an
international effort to reduce methane emissions, estimates about 20
percent of human-caused methane emissions come from the oil and gas
sector. That's likely an underestimated figure, Yacovitch told EHN,
"because there's really not that much data on offshore assets—the
field of measuring emissions, particularly in the Gulf of Mexico, is
fairly new."

Yacovitch and her team randomly selected and studied 103 sites,
looking at air quality from the platforms as seepage on the ocean
floor is hard to measure. The team looked at a mix of both active and
decommissioned, shallow and deep, and found platforms emitted methane
at widely ranging rates
[[link removed]]: from zero to
190 kilograms per hour. And the top 2 percent of emitters accounted
for 20 percent of the total methane emissions.

The data show that not every well, orphaned or not, is guaranteed to
leak. But when a well does leak, there is huge variability in
emissions.

They only surveyed 103 areas—so there is a chance that, though they
randomly selected their surveyed regions, their data may not be an
accurate representation.

Nonetheless, the study points to an incredible problem. The top 2
percent of emitters, so-called super-emitters, leak very high levels
of methane, but are largely unidentified in a literal sea of sites.
While 2 percent may sound small, when the total is 55,292 wells in
federal waters, that amounts to 1,104 super-emitters in national
waters.

What's more, "a lot of wells are undocumented," Mary Kang
[[link removed]], an environmental engineer at
McGill University, told EHN. Kang has years of research experience
looking at leaky, abandoned oil and gas wells. "You go out and you
don't find them. And then you go somewhere else looking for one, but
you find 10 others."

An _Environmental Science & Technology_ paper
[[link removed]] from earlier
this year states that "current U.S. government inventories
overestimate the number of oil and gas platforms in federal waters
while missing platforms located in state waters." Scientists found
that more than 1,300 offshore facilities were missing from government
documentation.

These facilities are likely older and therefore larger, with
disproportionately high spikes of methane emissions, from early
industry years when tracking measures were even less stringent.

The authors suggest that U.S. methane emissions for the country's
whole natural gas supply chain are as much as 60 percent greater than
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Greenhouse Gas Inventory.

Individual states are responsible for sites in their own waters, but
as far as monitoring and tracking their wells, "different states
definitely do it differently, and some do it almost not at all," Chris
Konek [[link removed]] told EHN.
Konek manages the oil and gas methane science studies at the Climate &
Clean Air Coalition (CCAC), which is part of the UN Environment
Programme. He said identifying where wells are in the vast ocean is a
difficult undertaking.

Yacovitch and her team experienced that challenge. When trying to
navigate to survey sites, the team found discrepancies between where
government records said oil and gas platforms were versus where they
are. "Sometimes we would say, 'We swear there's a platform out here,'
but we'd go and there's nothing there," Yacovitch said.

A lot of research in this area thus far has focused on measuring how
much methane each well is emitting, said Kang, who has spent years
researching abandoned oil and gas wells. But, terms like "leakage" are
poorly defined.

"If you see no methane emissions on the ocean floor, or at the water's
surface, does that mean there was no leakage? No, it doesn't," Kang
said. An absence of gas bubbles coming up to the ocean's surface and
low methane measurements in the air do not guarantee there is zero gas
escaping.

Kang also said there is no standard definition for what flow rate
constitutes leakage across the industry. If you look at just high
emitters, depending on how you define "high," then leaky wells are
just 10 to 20 percent. But depending on how you define that threshold
for leakage, the proportion of leaky wells could go up to 50, maybe 80
percent. "The bigger questions are, how many wells are out there, and
how long are they emitting for?" Kang added.

There are many wells that are active for just a few years, if at all,
but once a well is abandoned, "they're going to be abandoned for
decades and centuries," Kang said.

Industry reports show pretty consistent numbers of newly drilled or
active wells in a given area of oil and gas production over time. But
if you read between the lines, that means that the numbers of
abandoned and decommissioned wells are always growing.

“A multi-billion dollar issue” 
There is an upcoming wave of wells that will be plugged and abandoned
in the coming years—a surge that science and industry have long seen
coming. According to a June article in World Oil
[[link removed]],
"In the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, which generates about 15 percent of the
nation's output, explorers are expected to spend about $1 billion a
year over the next half decade to decommission hundreds of wells."

A 2018 paper [[link removed]] says that
"in recent years, the shallow water region has witnessed record levels
of decommissioning activity due to aging fields, sustained low oil and
gas prices, and greater regulatory oversight and scrutiny." Moreover,
"more than 40 percent of all decommissioning activity to date has
occurred over the past decade."

"From a strategic point of view, now is a very unique opportunity for
us to admit there's a problem," said Williams, the LSU engineer. Every
well ever drilled will need to be plugged. With a cascade of plugging
projects imminent, it is imperative now more than ever to nail down
proper methodology.

One 2019 paper
[[link removed]]
reviewing plug and abandonment methods found that, despite many layers
of cylindrical casings and cement barriers—the industry's most-used
technique for plugging, many wells still leak because of chemical
stressors and the constant shifting tectonics of the Earth.

"Just because you plug a well, that doesn't mean it's plugged
forever," Williams said. "It's plugged for as long as that piece of
material is going to last."

It's a fallacy to think a company will clean up their mess once they
no longer want to produce oil or gas, said Milliken Biven.

Evidence is mounting that the story for these wells rarely ends
cleanly after plugging and abandonment.

In a recent study [[link removed]] based
on marine hydroacoustic imaging of plugged wells in the North Sea,
scientists found that 926 wells out of the 1,792 observed (52 percent)
are likely to leak. By their estimates, these supposedly plugged wells
in the central North Sea could emit anywhere from 0.9 to 3.7 kilotons
of methane a year.

These supposedly plugged wells are by no means leak proof, but the way
leasing, contracting, and liability happens, companies technically
aren't liable for leaks post-plug and abandonment, Milliken Biven
said. "Everything fails eventually, but there is no commitment on any
one side to actually look at these leaks in perpetuity."

The industry could find solutions, Williams said, but huge oil and gas
companies are not dedicating money into finding them, though they
definitely could. "There are technological solutions out there that we
could bring over and apply to this problem," he said. "But they're in
other industries, they're in aerospace, they're in medicine, they're
in all these other disciplines." These other industries have solved
similar problems of leakage and degrading materials as far back as 30
years ago.

The barrier to finding better plugging and abandonment protocols,
therefore, is not an issue of innovation, but one of willingness and
initiative. And cost is a major deterrent. It's a feedback loop,
Williams said: Companies don't want to address the issue due to costs,
and so the problems worsen and become more expensive—and more
difficult—to fix over time.

When it comes to the per-well cost of plugging, "there's huge
variation," said Kang. She parsed U.S. government data to see how much
they were spending on plugging—the government becomes responsible
for plugging wells when operators go bankrupt and cannot shoulder
their liabilities. "Not every well is the same. But the per well cost
is anywhere from the high tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands
of dollars, or even more than a million." Those figures are just based
on government spending. Data on corporate plug and abandonment
spending is not available.

A BSEE document
[[link removed]]
on Decommissioning Methodology and Cost Evaluation calculates the
average cost of decommissioning an offshore well in the Gulf to be in
the range of $340,000 to more than $420,000 for wells less than 400
feet deep, which is what the majority of older, soon-to-be
decommissioned wells are. For a well 5,000 feet deep that could go up
to almost $1.5 million.

Wells in state waters may be all the more problematic, since they are
usually older and probably did not have to adhere to modern safety and
environmental standards.

"I did an estimate, just a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and I
think in Louisiana it's easily a $2-5 billion-worth problem," said
Williams. "And that is just Louisiana. Nationwide, it's definitely a
multi-billion dollar issue."

Furthermore, Williams wants oil and gas to take a leaf out of
nuclear's book: Nuclear energy producers will often think in terms of
life cycle costs, taking a small percentage of energy sales and saving
that money for disposing nuclear waste. The fossil fuel industry has
no equivalent, he said, so by the time it is time to retire a site,
"there has been no money saved by the regulator or by the government
or by anybody to help with those costs of plugging and getting the
areas cleaned up."

Konek added that some of the most potentially effective strategies are
mostly non-technical, like incentivizing methane storage: "In certain
places there's a lack of infrastructure to get gas to market, and so
you have companies that are letting that go." Finding more efficient
ways to store and use that gas could convince companies to keep better
track of the methane gas coming from their wells.

As it stands, letting methane pool and seep means letting all that
methane get to the atmosphere. "Depending on the water depths, we
estimated in total, probably about a third of the gases that is
emitted at the sea floor will enter the atmosphere," Matthias Haeckel
[[link removed]], a marine geochemist and an author of
the North Sea hydroacoustic imaging study, told EHN. At shallow water
depths, around a hundred feet or less, all that emitted methane will
get to the atmosphere in a few months, he added.

But even if methane doesn't make its way from the sea floor to the
atmosphere, the act of drilling results in fractures and pathways for
gas to pool and accumulate in ways that it otherwise would not,
potentially creating risk of blowout events, Christoph Böttner
[[link removed]]
told EHN. Böttner is a marine geoscientist at the University of Kiel
and one of Haeckel's co-authors.

In their study, Böttner and Haeckel's team used hydroacoustic imaging
to look at marine sediments and estimate where pools of methane lie in
the ocean floor. Using this technique in tandem with existing regional
seismic data, they said, could guide industry away from potentially
problematic areas. Layer on satellite imaging and infrared
spectroscopy, and you have a much better chance at getting an accurate
idea of where gas flow exits.

Uncontrolled flow of natural gas, including methane is also a leading
hazard for oil and gas workers. The Deepwater Horizon
[[link removed]]
blowout event is still salient a full decade later. But measures to
prevent future blowouts have actually decreased in the last decade.
According to the AP
[[link removed]],
"inspections fell from 4,712 in 2013 to 3,717 in 2019," and while in
2016 the government required companies to test their blowout
preventers every 14 days, "the Trump Administration allows companies
to test every 21 days, saying more frequent testing would risk
equipment failure."

Microbes and methane 
Methane escaping the ocean floor can be a completely normal
phenomenon, especially in the Gulf of Mexico, Jennifer Biddle
[[link removed]],
a biochemist at the University of Delaware, told EHN. Biddle studies
natural methane seeps at or under the ocean floor and assesses how
that gas affects microbiota
[[link removed]]. She said that the
tectonic geography of the Gulf of Mexico makes it prone to frequent
little earthquakes—combined with all the fossil fuel inside the
sediments of the sea floor, the whole area is a natural methane
emitter. But microbes generally eat that gas before it reaches the
surface.

Microflora and microfauna thrive off of this methane, providing the
base for other organisms to come and enrich the habitat ecology.

At natural seep sights, Biddle said, "a lot of estimates are that
[microbes] can take up over 90 percent of the methane that is
released." But when you add human activity that increases both the
rate of gas going up and the number of sites gas is released from, the
balance is thrown off and the microbes have a hard time keeping up,
she said.

Milito, the president of the National Ocean Industries Association,
said in an email that methane emissions from oil and gas activity are
unlikely, and that "most data regarding methane leaks from the Gulf of
Mexico actually point to natural seepage from the sea floor. Some
studies estimate that there are 20,000 natural seeps in the Gulf of
Mexico."

_Related: Major oil and gas companies join program to cut methane
emissions
[[link removed]]_

But the presence of oil in the Gulf of Mexico is very likely
compounding the issue. A 2011 paper
[[link removed]]
in _Annual Review of Marine Science _says that "the co-occurrence of
oil with methane at the sea floor frequently leads to bubbles coated
with oil," which prevents the methane in those bubbles from diffusing
and allows more bubbles to reach the surface, intact.

"We'll go somewhere like the Gulf of California, where there's
definitely gas coming out of the sea floor, but there's so much
microbial activity, that you hardly ever see bubbles coming up at the
surface," Biddle said."Versus in the Gulf of Mexico, the rate in some
of these areas is so high that you see huge bubbles coming up to the
surface. And so that's obviously the stuff that microbes aren't able
to eat."

The ocean burping up pockets of gas is an indication that things are
off-kilter. Given the natural presence of seepage in the Gulf of
Mexico, the microbes there are probably robust enough to handle a
little more methane than in other places, but unfortunately, Biddle
said, we don't really know what that threshold is. In places like
Finland and Canada, the governments are currently funding research to
find those baseline microbial consumption abilities, she added, and
those results "might change how they prepare for industrial projects."
Unfortunately, the Gulf of Mexico is beyond that point.

International cooperation 
Even with its poor record-keeping, the U.S. has one of the better
public datasets when it comes to offshore wells, Manfredi Caltagirone
[[link removed]],
an officer at the United Nations Environment Programme, told EHN. He
added that the U.S. tends to have the most research funding—a new
challenge is getting that same scientific momentum to the rest of the
world.

These studies can be even more difficult to conduct overseas,
especially in areas of the world where the oil and gas industry is
controlled by national governments, said Chris Konek.

Under-documented methane emissions from oil and gas wells exist
wherever oil and gas drilling exists. Studies everywhere from the
Bohai Sea in China
[[link removed]]
to the North Sea
[[link removed]]
to the Sarat Basin in Australia
[[link removed]] indicate that fugitive
emissions are a global concern.

"You cannot manage what you do not measure," said Caltagirone.

The Climate & Clean Air Coalition, Environmental Defense Fund, UNEP,
and the European Commission recently announced the formation of The
Oil and Gas Methane Partnership
[[link removed]]—62
companies with assets on five continents have committed to measuring
and reporting methane emissions with an unprecedented level of
granularity.

Methane emissions from oil and gas could potentially be much easier to
get under control than emissions from other sectors, Caltagirone said.
Agriculture is hugely problematic when it comes to methane—but there
are about 2 million farms
[[link removed].]
in the U.S, and only about 9,000 independent oil and gas producers
[[link removed]].

Collaborating with governments and corporations alike is key,
Caltagirone said, especially since it's the companies who have the
technology, finance, and in-house expertise that can be put to good
use. "It's really a matter of willingness," he added—a willingness,
he said, that has been slow to grow because "the issue of methane
emissions was a very well-kept secret until very recently."

A natural place to start is to tackle the super-emitters Yacovitch
found. "The huge variability in emission rates, and the existence of
super-emitters, brings up the attractive idea that if you find these
few sites that are causing the larger proportion of emissions, you can
have a big impact on the total emissions," Yacovitch said.

Playing catch up 
Plugging and abandonment efforts right now are playing catch-up—and
the past four years have not helped. During his time in office,
President Trump lifted new offshore drilling bans put in place by the
Obama Administration. When President-elect Joe Biden won the recent
election, the Trump Administration pushed to hold a final oil and gas
auction, selling leases more than half a million acres as companies
jumped to scoop up land—President-elect Biden has said he will put a
ban on new leases on public lands and waters
[[link removed]].
Mike Celata, Gulf of Mexico regional director for BOEM, told the Texas
Tribune that the auction pulled in $121 million in high bids,
exceeding the agency's target of $100 million.

Nothing short of a ban will be effective, said Milliken Biven, because
of the long-lived repercussions: "A lease that happens today may not
come online for another three years, and then it's going to operate
for 80 years — in what world does it make sense to keep continually
selling leases."

Beyond banning new leases, Caltagirone said working to mitigate
methane leaks from oil and gas wells could benefit all involved. "It
makes perfect sense from a climate perspective, from an economic
perspective. It makes sense for the companies that are trying to push
natural gas to be in the energy mix a little longer, and it makes
sense for the governments because it creates jobs—I cannot think of
one actor for which this doesn't make sense."

Milliken Biven agrees, which is why she has been proposing a new
federal agency to Congress, the Abandoned Well Administration. This
proposed agency would hire oil and gas workers to identify and geotag
every single well, as well as create a process for measuring and
repairing leaks.

The oil and gas sector lost more than 100,000 jobs
[[link removed]]
between March and August of 2020 alone. These people could be put to
work "for decades," Milliken Biven said.

"The scope and scale of this is so massive, and we need their skills
right now."

_Hannah Seo is a master's student in NYU's Science, Health and
Environmental Reporting program and a fall intern for EHN. _

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