Abandoned oil well wasteland 35/6/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() “If, all of a sudden, we could switch to all green renewable energy, that’s great, but these wells don’t disappear they’re still going to be there,” said Mary Kang, an assistant professor of civil engineering at McGill University in Montreal who was among the first scientists to call attention to the danger of abandoned wells. But Congress is unlikely to allocate enough money to seriously confront the issue. President Joe Biden, who has built much of his domestic policy around a transition to cleaner energy sources, wants to spend billions to put unemployed wildcatters to work plugging the wells. A garage in Pennsylvania exploded - a consequence, the state suspects, of abandoned gas wells. Air quality tests revealed high levels of benzene and carbon dioxide, most likely from a nearby abandoned oil well. In Colorado, a basement exploded, killing a man and his brother-in-law who were repairing a water heater, after an abandoned flowline leaked methane into the house.Ī Wyoming school shut down for more than a year after students and teachers complained of headaches for weeks. On the Navajo Nation, a hiker stumbled across wells oozing brown and black fluid that smelled like motor oil. In recent years, abandoned wells have been found under brush deep in forests and beneath driveways in suburbia. Without records of their whereabouts, it’s impossible to grasp the magnitude of the pollution or health problems they may be causing. They are a silent menace, threatening to explode or contaminate drinking water and leaking atmosphere-warming fumes each day that they’re unplugged. Regulators don’t know where hundreds of thousands of abandoned wells are because many of them were drilled before modern record-keeping and plugging rules were established. ![]()
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