OLEAN, N.Y. — Federal officials have made three trips to the Olean area to survey for abandoned oil wells.
A team from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory investigated a 300-acre site near the city earlier this year, hoping to pinpoint wells based on previous investigations and develop techniques to find them elsewhere in the country.
“So far this year, our team has made three visits to the site to complete fieldwork that verifies well locations and measures the amount of greenhouse gas they emit,” said Dr. Natalie Pekney, the lab’s lead natural gas infrastructure emissions quantification researcher.
The lab was called in by the state Department of Environmental Conservation, which has a database of 2,400 confirmed abandoned oil and gas wells. However, an unknown number of undocumented wells, for which no public records exist, dot the landscape. The Olean study is serving as a testbed to establish best practices for finding undocumented orphaned wells throughout the area covered by the Appalachian Region, which covers more than 200,000 square miles from New York to Mississippi.
Most of the wells at the Olean site were drilled between the 1920s and ‘40s, and teams found 63 wells, and low leakages of methane were identified at four wells.
“They were not the ‘super emitters’ we’ve seen in other locations,” Pekney said. “However, having their emissions rates is critical so that New York officials can prioritize which wells to plug and make decisions to use resources for maximum impact.”
“Old wells can leak methane. Plus, the soil around these old wells can be unstable, which poses a significant safety threat,” she said. Along with leaking greenhouse gasses, wells can contaminate groundwater and create other environmental issues.
Along with DEC data, researchers reported using data from a drone-based survey by Binghamton University. Using magnetometers on the drones that detect iron by measuring changes in the ground’s gravitational field, metal well casings could be located on maps. That data, plus historic maps and records, guided investigators on the ground to verify well locations and measure emissions.
The data collected will help determine optimal grid patterns that drones need to complete to produce accurate magnetic survey maps over challenging terrain in other sites around the country — such as a planned expedition to find measuring emissions from wells within the Daniel Boone National Forest in eastern Kentucky.
Previously, the team worked at Oil Creek State Park near Titusville, Pa. — the home of the first commercial oil well, drilled in 1859. While the first well triggered an oil boom, it left hundreds of abandoned oil wells in the region — many of which were drilled before environmental laws were enacted and were never documented on public maps and records.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021 set aside $1.15 billion to cap old wells. The Department of the Interior announced in August that over $560 million had been allocated to states for capping thousands of abandoned wells. The bill also set aside $30 million to establish a research consortium aimed at developing technologies to find wells. NETL is one of five national labs in the consortium.
