Undocumented Orphaned Wells

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) directs DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy Carbon Management (FECM) to implement a research program to assist federal land management agencies, states, and Indian tribes in identifying and characterizing undocumented orphaned wells. The BIL provides robust investments to plug these undocumented orphaned wells, which will help communities reduce methane emissions and eliminate other environmental impacts. Part of this investment includes $30 million to assist in identifying and characterizing the environmental risks of undocumented orphaned wells. This investment is part of the administration’s overall response in remediating environmental harms, addressing the legacy pollution that harms communities, creating good-paying jobs, and advancing long overdue environmental justice.

Generally, orphaned wells are defined as an idle well for which the operator is unknown or insolvent. It is estimated that there are hundreds of thousands of undocumented orphaned wells leaking methane in the United States with unknown locations and missing information, such as ownership or construction details. The total estimated number of undocumented orphaned wells reported by states is between 310,000 and 800,000.

The Undocumented Orphaned Well Program seeks to find and characterize undocumented orphaned wells and determine the physical locations, methane emissions, wellbore integrity, and other environmental impacts of those wells.

To begin developing this program, DOE, in collaboration with the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission (IOGCC), created a research consortium that consists of five national laboratories — Los Alamos National Laboratory, NETL, Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratory, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This consortium leverages institutional knowledge, existing processes, and fundamental and applied science expertise to undertake the primary objectives as defined in the BIL, focusing specifically on undocumented orphaned oil and gas wells in multiple basins and plays on private and federal land across the United States.

Over the next five years, the Undocumented Orphaned Well Program will:

• Establish a collaborative framework via the consortium.
• Develop and test technologies and processes in the field.
• Develop best practices for identification and characterization.
• Ultimately deploy these developed technologies at scale.

The technologies developed under this program will help further the administration’s emissions reduction goals to reduce methane emissions by 30% compared with 2020 levels by 2030.

A workshop was held in April 2022 to kickoff this program. The presentations from this workshop can be found here.