The hidden leaks of Pennsylvania's abandoned oil and gas wells

Laurie Barr spent a recent Saturday like she spends a lot of her weekends: trodding through the thorny and damp woodlands of rural north-western Pennsylvania, juggling a point-and-shoot camera, a GPS navigator, a cell phone, and, most importantly for the mission at hand, a methane detector.

“I found one!” Barr yelled from deep in the woods to her two friends – fellow abandoned oil and gas well enthusiasts who were decidedly more hesitant to walk off the pre-cut path.

“Here’s the spot they killed the last abandoned well hunter,” Barr joked from somewhere deep in the woods. Then Barr did something she’s done hundreds of times in the last three years – she leaned over a foot-wide hole in the ground and waved around the gas detector until it began beeping. First the beeps were slow, then rapid.

“I haven’t met a well that hasn’t leaked some amount,” she said, taking a picture of the hole, marking the location on her GPS device, and walking back towards the path. “Some are high emitters, some are low emitters, but they all leak.”

The problem for a well hunter like Barr, and for the state of Pennsylvania, is that there are about 200,000 of them.

For much of its history Pennsylvania has been synonymous with oil, gas and coal extraction. Many of its municipalities and geographic features are named after the state’s main economic lifeline – Oil Creek, the village of Burning Well, the city of Carbondale. Oil and coal museums, monuments, and landmarked oil rigs pay tribute to the state’s pioneering past of fossil fuel development.

Even the McDonald’s in Bradford, one of Barr’s favorite locations to take visitors, has a historical well in its parking lot. A sign on the fence that surrounds it proclaims the well is the oldest in the area, producing oil from the 1870s to the present.

But Pennsylvania’s incessant tribute to its past might mask the more troublesome, and still ongoing effects of 150 years of oil and gas production. The fragments of infrastructure from decades of unregulated industry – a pipe in the woods, a few bubbles under a lake – might not be as visible as the monuments to its main industry. But when the less glamorous aspects of the state’s past do bubble up, the results can be ugly.

No one knows exactly how many abandoned oil and gas wells litter Pennsylvania or the US. The state’s Department of Environmental Protection estimates the number is close to 200,000. Some estimates are a little lower, some much higher. Across the country, the number could be more than a million. Most of the wells are relic of of a time when states didn’t bother to regulate much of what happened on private land, including oil and gas drilling, and when most Americans didn’t think twice about a seemingly esoteric issue like the environment.

But hindsight has proven that losing track of hundreds of thousands of oil and gas wells can lead to some problems. For decades, many of the wells have leaked methane into the air, soil and water.

Now, as the state makes its way through the seventh year of a new drilling boom, thanks to the technology of hydraulic fracturing, the old wells are posing an increasing threat. The more companies drill in the state’s Marcellus Shale, the more likely it becomes that the old wells will act as a pathways for newly-released gas to make its way into the earth, streams, and even people’s homes, with potentially deadly results.

The state has launched a renewed effort into finding the wells, but no one, including state regulators, thinks they’ll be able to find most of the wells across the state anytime soon. And even if they did, regulators acknowledge it would cost untold sums and many decades to plug the wells with concrete to ensure the methane stays in the ground.

“Trying to locate all the wells would be an impossible task, but we at least need to raise awareness about them,” Barr said. “We need to face the fact that we’ve dug ourselves into this massive hole.”

Barr, who lives a few towns south of Bradford, has been hunting for oil and gas wells for three years. Until 2011 she was mainly a photographer and illustrator, and an anti-fracking activist in her spare time.

But in the winter and spring of that year, a series of fires and explosions in north-western Pennsylvania, including a house explosion in Bradford, were linked to abandoned wells. The explosion at 10 Helen Lane completely destroyed Tom Federspiel’s house. Luckily, Federspiel had decided to shovel snow that morning, and was outside when his house ignited. After an extensive investigation state regulators found that methane had migrated through an abandoned well and up through Federspiel’s basement. Three wells were ordered plugged by the state.

Barr realized that while thousands of activists fought against the fracking boom, hardly anyone was paying attention to the threat posed by the oil and gas industry’s past.

“There was a pipe in my yard but I thought it was just a pipe. Then I saw there were pipes sticking out of our neighborhood everywhere,” she said. “I realized I actually lived on an abandoned oil and gas field, and I didn’t even know what abandoned wells were.”

Now Barr spends nearly all of her time as the sole operator of Save Our Streams PA. Often from early in the morning until late at night, and nearly every weekend she’s either finding, mapping, photographing or talking about abandoned wells.

That involves driving around in her beat-up Jeep to libraries and local municipal offices and checking out maps so old they look like antiques. And sometimes it involves long treks into the woods or canoe trips in towns like Bradford.

The city is home to under 10,000 people, surrounded by oil and gas rigs, a large refinery, strip malls, woods and not much else.

Its streets are run down and many of its residents poor, but its hotels are booming, filled with men in Timberland boots and neon safety vests. They crowd the parking lots of the town’s bars with their pickup trucks after a days work in the fields. “Tree Huggers Suck,” read one bumper sticker.

Joann Parrick and Mark Dalton, friends of Barr’s who also are interested in abandoned wells, reckon they’re likely two of what can’t be more than a couple dozen Bradford residents who are critical of the oil and gas industry. They, like Barr, moved into a house without realizing it was surrounded by abandoned wells.

“I wouldn’t have bought this house if I had known,” Parrick said. “I wouldn’t have even moved to this area. This is like swiss cheese land over here.”

Barr recently met up with the couple to go searching for a well Parrick and Dalton happened upon during a canoe trip the previous weekend.

The three piled in Dalton’s truck with a canoe and kayaks strapped on the back and headed down to the reservoir in the middle of the Allegheny National Forest. When Congress authorized the creation of the Kinzua Dam and Reservoir in 1960 it forced the relocation of hundreds of Seneca Native Americans, despite the land being guaranteed to the tribe under federal treaty. The legal battle between the Seneca and the Feds is well-documented. Less well-documented is the fact that the dam flooded an old oil field, burying potentially hundreds of unplugged and poorly plugged wells under water.

Rotating between paddle, camera, and gas meter, Barr made her way toward the middle of the reservoir. After about 20 minutes, she and her friends spotted it: a steady stream of small bubbles coming to the surface that would disappear anytime the water rippled. The bubbles are one of the only remaining signs that there was once an entire industry beneath their feet.

Some wells are easier to spot than others: often a small section of rusty pipe might be sticking out of the ground. But many wells are nothing more than holes in the ground, their casings removed by scavengers, oil companies, or dutiful citizens during the US’s drive to collect metal for the war effort during World War II.

Wells were often drilled in specific patterns and often spaced only a few hundred feet away from each other, so once Barr finds a few, it’s easier for her to find more.

In seemingly pristine places like the Allegheny forest the wells are so densely packed together and so prone to leaking that the EPA determined in the 1980s that the forest was essentially experiencing a slow-motion environmental disaster. The EPA spent millions to help plug some of the wells, but not without opposition from the industry and the local residents who support it. One EPA inspector even claimed he was shot at while walking through the forest.

Like every effort to locate and plug abandoned wells, the EPA’s short-lived program only addressed a tiny fraction of the problem.

Not knowing where the vast majority of the wells are obviously makes determining their cumulative effects difficult. Studies are scarce. But according to several experts, the wells could account for about 10% of the state’s total methane emissions. Methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas, several dozen more times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.

“If emissions from abandoned wells are indeed a tenth of the methane emissions, that’s a real, substantive problem for global warming,” said Rob Jackson, a professor of earth system science at Stanford University. “We could be setting ourselves up for a situation that lasts centuries.”

The state’s Department of Environmental Protection recently launched an effort to digitize maps from various state agencies in an effort to find wells that are documented in some form but still not on the DEP’s master list. So far the agency only has about 8,700 on its list.

The state has also partnered with the National Energy Technology Laboratory, a branch of the US Department of Energy, to conduct helicopter flights over state forests. The helicopter is equipped with an electromagnetic sensor that can find the general location of wells as long as the metal hasn’t been stripped out of them. The NETL’s helicopter data is still being analyzed, but its researchers say they’ll likely find at least a couple hundred.

That still leaves the vast majority off the map. And it still leaves the question of what to do with the wells once they’re found unanswered.

“Even if you knew where all the sites were, you could only do so many contracts [to plug the wells] each year,” said Seth Pelepko, who heads the DEP’s abandoned oil and gas well program. “So this is always going to be an incremental process.”

According to Barr, if the DEP planned to plug every oil and gas well in the state at its current rate, getting to 200,000 would take hundreds if not thousands of years.

Given their limited budget, the state and NETL researchers say they’re focusing their efforts mostly on public land where new gas wells are likely to be drilled.

Once the NETL maps those wells, the idea is that either the state or fracking companies can plug them before new drilling begins. That way the state can at least help prevent new gas migration.

But activists like Barr say the state’s limited plugging won’t be enough.

Since 2007, Pennsylvania has issued nearly 45,000 new well permits. About a third of those are for “unconventional” wells. That means they’re often thousands of feet deep and hydraulically fracked, a process which requires myriad chemicals and leaves holes significantly more complicated to plug than traditional wells.

State leaders like Republican Governor Tom Corbett have made the case that regulations today are much more strict than in the past. Before 1956, oil and gas wells on private property didn’t even require permits. Now companies must go through mountains of paperwork to drill a well. The current regulatory system means newly drilled wells likely won’t go missing like their predecessors did. But they might still be abandoned.

The state currently requires companies to put down a bond of $4,000 for shallow wells and $10,000 for deeper ones. The state can (but is not required to) use that money to plug the wells if the companies abandon them.

The problem, according to experts, is that hiring plugging companies and buying enough concrete to fill many thousands of feet will almost always costs more than the price of the state’s bonds, especially for unconventional wells. That may give companies disincentive to plug their wells, and the state with the bill.

“It’s definitely not $10,000. Even $50,000 is a very optimistic number,” said Austin Mitchell, a postdoctoral fellow in the engineering department at Carnegie Mellon University who co-authored a study on the economics of abandoned wells. “Usually you want either the carrot or the stick to be big enough, but that doesn’t seem to be the case in Pennsylvania.”

It will be decades before anyone knows whether today’s oil and gas companies will pay for their wells or leave that burden to the state. Neither of Pennsylvania’s main industry groups – the Marcellus Shale Coalition and the Pennsylvania Independent Oil and Gas Association – responded to comments for this story.

But given Pennsylvania’s industry-friendly attitude, Barr and others are worried that the state’s oil and gas drilling past might be a prologue for the state’s Marcellus-fueled future.

“We could be leaving our future generations with the same problem we’re left with, only bigger,” Barr said. “We’re shovelling sand against the tide, and not doing anything to stem the tide.”