Environmental Issues with Orphaned Wells

Summary Orphaned oil and gas wells in the United States, abandoned without a responsible party, pose significant and widespread risks to the environment and public health. These wells contribute to methane emissions, groundwater contamination, and chemical migration, yet they received little attention from policymakers until recent decades. Systemic problems, including inadequate funding, insufficient environmental monitoring, and inconsistent regulatory definitions, limit the effectiveness of current risk management and remediation efforts. This study integrates national geospatial data with environmental, infrastructure, and demographic datasets to evaluate proximity-based impacts of more than 117,000 documented orphaned wells. Our analysis shows that more than 4,000 schools, 300 hospitals, and thousands of domestic water wells lie within exposure zones determined using risk-specific buffer distances. For example, we used a 2,000-meter buffer for air quality and buffers from 762 to 3,000 meters for water resources, based on previous studies of air pollution and groundwater migration to provide conservative safety margins. Millions of Americans, with disproportionately high numbers among minorities, older adults, and people with disabilities, live within one mile of an orphaned well. Orphaned wells nearby also threaten environmentally sensitive areas, including national and local parks, major surface water bodies, federally designated critical habitats, and critical infrastructure, for example, power plants and hazardous waste treatment sites. This study also identifies the technical potential to repurpose well sites for geothermal, wind, and solar energy, as well as for subsurface energy storage. It presents new opportunities to address the orphaned well crisis, namely the use of voluntary carbon credit markets to fund plugging activities. Our results offer a comprehensive assessment of both risks and opportunities for remediating orphaned wells with limited funding.