More than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells lurk in the hard rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental minefield that has been ignored for decades. No one — not industry, not government — is checking to see if they are leaking, an Associated Press investigation shows.
The oldest of these wells were abandoned in the late 1940s, raising the prospect that many deteriorating sealing jobs are already failing.
The AP investigation uncovered particular concern with 3,500 of the neglected wells — those characterized in federal government records as “temporarily abandoned.”
Regulations for temporarily abandoned wells require oil companies to present plans to reuse or permanently plug such wells within a year, but the AP found that the rule is routinely circumvented, and that more than 1,000 wells have lingered in that unfinished condition for more than a decade. About three-quarters of temporarily abandoned wells have been left in that status for more than a year, and many since the 1950s and 1960s — eveb though sealing procedures for temporary abandonment are not as stringent as those for permanent closures.
As a forceful reminder of the potential harm, the well beneath BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig was being sealed with cement for temporary abandonment when it blew April 20, leading to one of the worst environmental disasters in the nation’s history. BP alone has abandoned about 600 wells in the Gulf, according to government data.
I’m sure the invisible hand of the free market gently caresses each abandoned well, making sure it feels loved and safe.
geg6
Drill, baby, drill! Hell, YEAH!
ellaesther
I love how I come here and you make me feel alllll better….
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Better hope the Gulf doesn’t have a massive earthquake. It is possible though not likely. It will have to be renamed The Black Sea of the west..
bkny
the gulf of mexico is dead. i’m curious what the impact will be once those hurricanes start blowing thru. how likely is it that the winds will carry that oil, raining down on lawns, streets, farmland across the southeastern states.
amorphous
@geg6: Upcoming Palin tweet: Must drl unchkd wels 2save gulf + 4NRG NDpndns!
MattF
Yeah, a big earthquake in the Gulf would be… unfortunate. And then there’s the supersonic methane ignition shock wave when the gas comes out of solution, if you want stuff to worry about. Good thing these wells are only temporarily abandoned.
Dave
Dear baby Jesus, how is this not common knowledge?!
Stefan
Dear baby Jesus, how is this not common knowledge?!
What we have to do is kidnap a blonde white co-ed and then spread the news that she’s hidden besides one of those wells. Soon it’ll be on Nancy Grace and then watch out!
Comrade Dread
Oh, you liberals.
Don’t you understand the magnificence of the Invisible Hand.
If oil companies create environmental disasters, there’s a very large demand from people standing knee deep in oil for people to come clean it up.
Other corporations will form that specialize in environmental cleanup, competition will keep their prices low, and pretty soon, you’ll have lots of new green jobs flooding the region to clean up the oil that previously flooded the region.
And when those companies turn a large profit on the clean up work, oil companies can buy out shareholders at a huge profit.
That way, the next time an oil company cuts corners to save money and causes a massive loss for its parent unit, shareholders can rest assured that the profits the subsidiary earns from the cleanup work will offset the damages.
It’s win-win for everyone.
Well, except those losers in the Gulf, but it’s obvious they’ve committed the great sin of being Democrat otherwise the Invisible Hand wouldn’t punish them.
Phil
I hate to inject an optimistic note into this apocalyptic vision but presumably they could have been abandoned because they were worked out?
russell
private profit, public risk.
cleek
Oh beautiful for smoggy skies
insecticided grain
for strip-mined mountain’s majesty
above the asphalt plain
America, America
man sheds his waste on thee
and hides the pines with billboard signs
from sea to oily sea
—
George Carlin, ’72
i remember learning that song when i was 6. in 1976.
things haven’t changed much.
SpotWeld
And this is a huge reason why dropping a nuke down there won’t help.
twiffer
it is obviously obama’s fault that wells abandoned in the 40’s were not properly sealed.
PeakVT
I give AP a lot credit for doing this reporting, but the article lacks a key word: exploratory. The well the Deepwater Horizon was drilling was an exploratory well, the first one drilled into the Macondo field. The article doesn’t really explain that there are massive pressure differences between a exploratory well in a new field and an old production well.
Ohmmade
http://www.bpoilspillclock.com/
D-Chance.
I see a new bureaucratic opportunity! Inspector general of abandoned underwater oil wells… a six-figure job where you get wined and dined by every petroleum company around while doing the whirlwind tour of every coastal hot spot in the country.
And, who knows, you may not even have to do an actual inspection if you have a steady enough hand to trace over what the lobby boys write down for you in pencil…
amorphous
In all fairness, LiLo’s fingernail did have a very naughty word on it yesterday, so you can see why this isn’t a top priority.
Pangloss
I guess we’ve totally forgotten the environmental degredation that reached insane levels in the late 1960s. Rivers and lakes were dead, smothered in algae, catching on fire, etc. Oil spills off the coast of California were obscene, prompting bans that still exist. Air in California was dark brown. It was so terrible that Richard Nixon— freakin’ Nixon!– spearheadded the Clean Air Act, EPA, and the Clean Water Act. The difference those initiatives made was astounding.
Do we have to have $9.00 gasoline, a dead sea, and a thousand miles of tarred beaches before we can summon that kind of political will again?
slag
I don’t know why, but this reminds me that of course mama’s gonna help build the wall.
slag
@Pangloss:
This sentiment always bothers me. It wasn’t Nixon who spearheaded that stuff. The environmental movement forced it on him. There were massive protests in the streets back when people actually cared about massive protests in the streets. The public demanded environmental protection, and they got it. Nixon didn’t care about the EPA and didn’t do much for or against it after it was created.
Maude
@PeakVT:
Thanks.
And they come up with this story now. Why now?
If what Obama had done right at the start after th MC252 explosions, had been reported, the idiots who opine wouldn’t be saying he was slow to do anything.
evinfuilt
@cleek:
No, its changed a lot.
Strip Mined mountains??? Nah, we fixed that problem by removing the entire mountain from the picture. Also the asphalt is cracked and worn, with water pipes a bursting instead of Old Faithful.
I miss Carlin.
cleek
there are ~200 dead lakes in the Adirondacks alone. and the Hudson river remains a first-class environmental disaster.
hmm.
flew into Albany, NY last week. the smog layer was dramatic.
here it is in 2000.
Ohmmade
on-topic reminder of just how F’ing long the DWH well has been destroying the gulf:
http://www.bpoilspillclock.com/
uggh
HumboldtBlue
The well off the coast of Santa Barbara which led to the ban on offshore drilling here in Cali has been leaking steadily since as well.
Comrade Dread
[The well off the coast of Santa Barbara which led to the ban on offshore drilling here in Cali has been leaking steadily since as well.]
This will just encourage the fish to evolve a tolerance for oil or some real lungs and feet so they can come out on to land and inhabit mysterious coastal towns full of merpeople.
The Shoggoths are on their own.
Catsy
Here’s what really bugs me about this story:
We’ve been hearing from industry apologists for months now that the tar balls reported washing up on shores the spill couldn’t possibly have yet reached are normal–they’re just being noticed now that people are looking for them. They cite the weathered nature of the lumps and the “fact”–cited as if it were common knowledge–that a certain amount of seepage normally occurs in the Gulf.
The bothersome part is that they may be right, but not in the way they think.
What if all those weathered “tar balls” that supposedly wash up in the Gulf that aren’t connected to any known spill are the product of leaking, forgotten wellheads that nobody knows are leaking? This does not strike me as a particularly unlikely scenario.
I’m seriously to the point of saying fuck it: ban all deepwater drilling permanently, and ban all shallower offshore drilling until every well–operational and abandoned–has been rigorously inspected and blessed.
If it’s not feasible to do those inspections, we shouldn’t be allowing the wells in the first place. The principle behind the old saying of “don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time” goes double for activities that have the potential of doing catastrophic damage to the environment; if we can’t deal with the plausible worst-case failure scenarios, the activity shouldn’t be allowed.
Hugin & Munin
Catsy@28: Um, it is common knowledge that there are numerous natural seeps in the GOM, perhaps as high as 50k bbls/day.
Catsy
@Hugin & Munin: It may well be a fact, but it is not “common knowledge” to anyone other than the people who have an occupational need to have learned it. Other than those people, I will guarantee you out to five nines that not one person out of a million had even heard the phrase “natural seeps” before this crisis.
It’s also beside the point I’m making. The substances washing up in the Gulf may well have been from natural seeps. Then again, they might be from leaking wellheads. There’s a good chance that it’s a combination of both. The point is: without inspecting these wells, exactly how can we know? And if we can’t, what the fuck are we doing drilling them in the first place?
Gretchen D
I have a question. In our Boulder Daily Camera (Boulder, CO meager excuse for a newspaper) we’re getting letters to the editor about all the countries who offered help in the early days of “the spill”, but were turned down – this, of course, as an indicator of how awful Obama has been fixing the mess. What they’re saying doesn’t make sense to me. What’s the real story?
Zuzu's Petals
@Catsy:
It’s common knowledge to folks who actually live on the Gulf coast.
Zuzu's Petals
@Gretchen D:
Well, there’s this statement from the Unified Command a month or so ago:
Catsy
@Zuzu’s Petals:
That’s nice. Your anecdote is duly noted. Now would one of you care to address the actual point that I’ve now called out twice, or are you just going to sit back and cherry pick the “common knowledge” phrase as if the question of whether or not these seeps are common knowledge was anything other than incidental to the point?
Zuzu's Petals
@Catsy:
You were the one spending a full paragraph guaranteeing that fewer than 300 people had even heard the phrase “natural seep” before April 20. I suggest you refrain from making stupid comments if you don’t want people calling you on them.
As to your question about tarballs that have historically washed up on Gulf Coast beaches, why no, one can’t know the exact source without testing each and every one and then inspecting the source area itself. However, scientists have long confirmed the existence of natural seeps, located many of their sources, and made pretty specfic estimates of the quantity of oil they produce. Which is one way that that information became, well…common knowledge.
Catsy
@Zuzu’s Petals:
If you’re going to advise someone not to make stupid statements, it would be excellent if you would:
1) Not blatantly misquote them and make shit up
2) Keep in mind that the flow of time is linear and not get hopelessly confused about the order in which things occurred
3) Not make incredibly stupid statements yourself in the process
Since you apparently have problems with the whole concept of cause and effect, let me break it down in a way you might understand.
1) I added a bit of unnecessary verbiage to my original comment to the effect of “as if [natural seeps] were common knowledge”. The truth or falsity of the implication behind it has nothing whatsofuckingever to do with the validity of the point I was making.
2) Ignoring the point of the post in favor of latching onto this irrelevant phrase, you and H&M proceeded to challenge the truth of it.
3) I post a response that includes a paragraph pointing out that this is not in fact common knowledge–if it were, I might add, there wouldn’t be a need for every news article to exhaustively explain the premise–but also pointing out that whether true or not, it has nothing to do with the point.
4) You post a bunch of egregious bullshit that misquotes me, misrepresents what I said, conflates my response to H&M with my original comment, and continues to miss the point. The entire paragraph of yours I quoted above is predicated on refuting my assertion that the “common knowledge” verbiage was incidental to my original comment by confusing the paragraph response I wrote to H&M with said original comment.
My god, you really are either appallingly stupid or incapable of reading for comprehension.
I never questioned whether or not natural seeps existed nor whether or not they could produce tar balls. I absolutely fucking defy you to find a sentence in which I did, and quote it. You will not and cannot.
This is the point you have now spent two comments entirely missing:
Fact: it is impossible to distinguish a tar ball produced by natural seep from a tar ball produced by a leaking wellhead.
Fact: there are thousands of abandoned wellheads that have been neither maintained nor inspected in years, in some cases decades.
Fact: we do not know whether or not any of them are leaking, and cannot know that without inspecting them.
Fact: the age, circumstances and sheer number of abandoned wellheads makes it very likely that at least some are leaking an unknown amount.
Conclusion: it is possible that some of the tar balls in the Gulf attributed to natural seep are actually the product of leaking wellheads, and the possibility that these leaks exist mean that we should prioritize inspecting these abandoned wells.
Good grief. I will never understand the propensity of some people to completely ignore the point of an argument in favor of latching onto a phrase they dispute that has no effect on the validity of the argument.
Zuzu's Petals
@Catsy:
Good God lady, do you even read your own comments?
I’ll leave it to the reader to decide who is full of crap in this exchange.