New-York-Abandoned-Oil-Wells
Abandoned but not forgotten: New York’s once-booming oil industry and the wells it left behind
Western New York towns were built around oil production. Now, they grapple with abandoned wells — the remnants of an industry in decline.
By Jessie Blaeser, Ilena Peng and Stephen Mante Anti
When Paul Plants and his business partner started their oil company in 1970, they never expected to profit from the fossil fuel industry’s decline. “It’s an industry that is — was — very important,” Plants said. “I’m very proud of our involvement in it.”
Plants’ father had worked in oil, and Plants himself, now 84, started his own drilling company in New York and Pennsylvania, the historic seats of oil drilling in the U.S.
Faced with both declining output and shifting opinions on oil and gas in New York, roughly four decades later, Plants needed to pivot. Instead of drilling for oil, the Plants and Goodwin Oil Company began filling abandoned oil wells throughout the northeast.
Plants’ son and grandson took over the business and continue that work today. “The vast majority of the work that we do is plugging and abandonment of wells,” Steve said.
Allegany County, the former seat of oil production in New York State, now has more abandoned and unplugged wells than active wells. Left open and unchecked, unplugged wells can cause air pollution, contaminate water and release greenhouse gas. But oil companies and environmental advocates alike say state resources have already fallen short.
Though states like Texas and New Mexico are the modern hubs for U.S. domestic drilling, western New York is home to some of the country’s first oil wells. At its peak in 1882, New York State produced 6.7 million barrels of oil, more than 6 million of which came from a single county: Allegany.
New York experienced an “oil rush” in the late nineteenth century. Small towns grew by the thousands, and oil quickly became foundational to local economics. Its run, however, was short-lived. Aside from an uptick in production during World War II — when Paul’s dad was drafted, he was able to defer because his job in the domestic oil industry was deemed essential to the war effort — oil output in New York declined and thousands of wells, some over a century old, were left behind with no existing owner of record. In New York, the responsibility of plugging these “orphaned” wells falls to the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). Since 2014, the department has plugged 260 oil and gas wells.
A known 4,717 unplugged and abandoned wells remain, according to DEC data. An estimated 34,000 abandoned wells statewide have yet to be located at all.
These wells dot private properties, lurk in wetlands and hide beneath forest canopies, presenting environmental and safety risks for the state and the people who live nearby each individual site.
According to data from the DEC, 82 percent of the state’s documented abandoned and unplugged wells are located in the six counties that make up western New York. Allegany and Cattaraugus Counties — both in western New York — together account for 73 percent of the state’s total documented abandoned and unplugged wells.
Despite these risks, the local government of Allegany County is not overly concerned with the wells’ impact. According to Michelle Denhoff, the assistant director of economic development and planning for Allegany County, the topic rarely comes up in committee meetings, if ever.
This problem is not unique to New York. While oil drilling in the U.S. began in the nineteenth century, regulation did not appear until the early to mid twentieth century. The result is hundreds of thousands of abandoned and orphaned oil wells, left behind by drilling companies that have since closed production.
“Many wells that are now orphaned were drilled before there was any regulatory oversight,” the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission report states. “Many of these pre-regulatory wells were abandoned without being plugged or were plugged inadequately.”
Such is the case for western New York, where drilling began in 1860, just one year after the world’s first oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania.
A draft DEC environmental impact statement from the 1990s specifies the state of nineteenth century regulation in New York, noting that in 1879, the state passed legislation requiring abandoned wells to be plugged “to prevent freshwater contamination by oil and gas. “But the 1879 legislation required no freshwater plug and had no strong enforcement mechanism,” the authors explain.
As of 2018, there were roughly 800,000 orphaned and unplugged wells nationwide, including 56,600 documented orphaned wells and up to 746,000 undocumented orphaned wells — those without existing permits or records, typically drilled “prior to regulatory oversight — according to the latest annual report from the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Comission.
According to the EPA, abandoned oil and gas wells across the country are responsible for roughly 7 million metric tons of CO2 emissions per year, the equivalent of greenhouse emissions from roughly 1.5 million cars. The problem of these wells — abandoned, orphaned, unplugged, undocumented and altogether forgotten — is a national one.
The consequences of orphaned unplugged wells mount year by year, as they are known to leak oil, saline water and other fluids as well as gases into the air. According to a 2021 report from Policy Bridge, the impacts of leakage include “air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, groundwater contamination, soil degradation, damage to ecosystems, and risk of explosions, all of which pose threats to human health.”
Plants and Goodwin represent one of the many private companies that are contracted by states or other oil companies to plug wells in the northeastern corridor of the U.S. Paul, who lives on the same nearly 250-acre farm he grew up on, said contractors also plugged the 80 abandoned wells on his own land in Pennsylvania’s McKean County, which is adjacent to Allegany County.
“It grieves me a little bit that people who made lots of money in the early days did not take care of the wells and cap them,” Paul said. “But it’s vitally important that it gets done.”
Walter Hang, an environmental activist who has for decades been at the forefront of moving conservation efforts through the New York state legislature, explained that as oil production in the state went down, abandoned wells went up. Oil companies either neglected to plug the infrastructure they left behind or went out of business before they could address their old wells.
“The number of active production wells went down, down, down, down, down,” he said. “They play out and in theory, they get abandoned and get plugged.”
Today, New York’s oil production is almost negligible.
“It’s so low, it’s not even worth it,” Hang said.
Oil output in New York actually increased from 2018 to 2019, but the state produced just over 277,000 barrels of oil in 2019. By comparison, Texas produced over 1.4 billion barrels of oil from Sept. 2018 to Aug. 2019.
While some see the oil industry as the former tent pole to the local economy, Hang views it more as an infection whose effects are still being felt.
In the early 1990s, Hang founded Toxics Targeting, an environmental database that manages data for over 650,000 known and potential toxic sites in New York. The database tracks abandoned and unplugged wells, including wells unknown to the DEC but located by Hang.
“You can literally walk around, and you can see the abandoned well casings. You can see the infrastructure,” Hang said of his time in the field. “It was just unbelievable how much contamination was obvious to the naked eye.”
Abandoned wells | Courtesy of Walter Hang
In 2013, the New York Works Well Plugging Initiative allocated $2 million to the DEC to plug orphaned and abandoned wells. But at the current pace, it would take the DEC roughly 145 years just to plug all documented abandoned wells in the state, let alone the tens of thousands of wells yet to be located.
“The reservoirs for oil, gas and brinewater still have pressure on them,” Steve Plants explained of abandoned wells. “So they force those fluids into the well bore. They come up the hole, and…they can pollute large sections of freshwater aquifers. And then you’ve got methane leaking at [the] surface going into the atmosphere. And you’ve [also] got crude oil or brine that’s getting on [the] surface and affecting surface waters and lands.”
Steve said most of the over 3,000 abandoned wells he’s plugged since the 1990s were leaking gas.
With proper funding and resources, the process for plugging wells is straightforward: access the bottom of the well, remove any old materials or trash and fill the hole with cement. But when age is factored in — keeping in mind that some of the area’s wells are over a century old — the entire process takes longer and costs skyrocket.
Getting to the bottom of a well, Steve said, often presents the biggest challenge. “[It] could be 600 feet, it could be 6,000, it could be 20,000,” he said. Part of that is pulling out deteriorating materials, like casing that used to keep freshwater out of the well. “Almost all [the casing] is rotten now.”
“You literally have to fish it out,” Steve said. “It’s all rotted and decayed and in chunks.” Plants and Goodwin uses equipment that functions as a giant magnet to pull up old pieces of rotten pipes. And if the well caves in while it’s being filled, “you’ve got to start all over again,” Steve said.
Nationwide, the average cost of plugging a single well ranges from $3,700 to $97,626, according to the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission’s 2019 report. In New York state, the average cost is just over $35,500. In 2018, the state had expended $1.6 million on efforts to plug abandoned wells; in that same year, only 119 wells were plugged.
If the state were to plug all documented and undocumented abandoned wells in the state on its own, it would need at least $1.35 billion in funding.
Ronald Bishop, an associate professor at SUNY Oneonta who has researched New York’s abandoned wells, said the DEC’s budget is too low to even allow the department to follow up with companies who have abandoned their wells, let alone plug them.
“If our DEC had the means to catch up with the owners who were just walking away from their wells this year, they would,” said Bishop, who presented his research on the department’s procedures for plugging wells to the DEC in 2013.
“These people care,” he said. “They’re not careless or callous, although their chronic under-resourcing might make them seem that way.”
A DEC spokesperson did not directly comment on how funding is used to verify, survey and plug New York wells, the spokesperson noted the department’s investment in new technology to help locate unknown wells state-wide.
Federal legislation allocating funding to plugging wells would be a gamechanger, said Brian Smith, the associate executive director at Citizens Campaign for the Environment. But it is only the beginning of the much longer process of locating and plugging currently undocumented wells, which will require even more resources.
This June, Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) and Kevin Cramer (R-ND) sponsored the REGROW Act, which would commit roughly $4.75 billion to plug orphaned and abandoned wells nationwide, reducing methane emissions and protecting water sources in the process.
But even in the event of newfound funding, western New York would still face challenges, as efforts to plug wells in Allegany County have even been opposed by environmentalists.
In 1997, Larry Behan, a long-time New York environmentalist with over half a century of advocacy experience, opposed the plugging of 70 abandoned oil wells in Allegany State Park.
Behan said at the time, his organizations, including the Adirondack Mountain Club, the Sierra Club and others, were more concerned with logging in the park than leaking methane. “We thought about what kind of devastation it would produce,” he said, warning against the “5 miles of 20- to 30-foot-wide road” that would be drawn through the state park in his 1997 editorial in Buffalo News.
As Behan and other environmentalists see it, sometimes solving one environmental threat can lead to another. Plugging wells can be disruptive to communities in addition to the surrounding nature, Steve said.
“A lot of these wells were drilled in remote areas,” Steve said. “Areas have grown up around them, entire towns or cities have grown up around them, and many times the wells will have a house built right next to them” Forests, homes, farms — unplugged and orphaned wells lurk around the state, each at risk of leaking methane into the atmosphere or directly into homes.
“You could be 18 to 20 inches away from an occupied residence while you’re [plugging a well],” Steve said. Yet according to the Department of Mineral Services, anyone who stumbles across an abandoned well should remain a safe distance away: at least 35 feet.
On average, the time between a well being completed and being plugged in New York State is 30 years, which is in line with the average lifespan of a well, according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. In Cattaraugus County, the median time between a well’s completion and plugging was 34 years — which means the times for half of the county’s wells in the state were under 34, while the other half was above that amount. In Allegany County, the median time was 26 years. But some wells remain open, unplugged and inactive for much longer. One well in Oswego County, which borders Lake Ontario, was completed in 1890 and was plugged in 2019 — a 129-year lifespan.
New technologies are being developed in hopes of extending the lifespans of these wells. Some companies, like Diversified Energy Co. — which has amassed more wells than Exxon Mobil — purchases and resurrects formerly abandoned wells, arguing that the wells have decades left in their life cycle, according to an investigation conducted by Bloomberg.
The website for Pioneer Oil Museum in Bolivar, a town in Allegany, reads: “The New York oil fields await new technology to recover the remaining substantial oil reserves,” illustrating the hope of some locals for a return of the industry that built the town.
In the meantime, the museum documents the oil industry’s influence on the town, which the museum describes as the “heart of the old Allegany Oil Field.” There are enough wells in the area that the museum’s board president, Dan Davison, grew up searching for them in his hometown of Bolivar, which was founded during the 1882 oil boom in the region.
In the winter, former oil roads on his parents’ land became snowmobile tracks. In the summer, Davison would wander off in search of signs of the former oil industry: open wells, wells with pumping equipment on them and old engines — all sites now defined as abandoned and unplugged oil wells by the Department of Mineral Services, the division of the DEC charged with regulating and plugging oil and gas wells in the state.
The Pioneer Oil Museeum (left) and Bolivar Gas Pump (right) | Courtesy of Dan Davison
Davison said he grew up on a 42-acre property containing roughly a hundred wells. In his lifetime, he estimates that he has seen between 500 and 700 different wells across the state.
“You don’t go very far without seeing remnants of the oil industry,” Davison said, making a point to characterize the wells neutrally. “They’re not bad remnants, there’s just wells here or there.”
Nearly 25 years ago, Behan characterized “Allegany’s oil-boom scar” as “almost healed.” In this sense, Behan represents one of three perspectives on oil in Western New York: that it did in fact leave a scar, but is no longer a major concern. Meanwhile, others, like Walter Hang, are extremely concerned and actively advocating for the wells to be plugged as quickly as possible. And others still, like Dan Davison, are proud of the oil industry legacy in western New York, and would characterize the nineteenth century oil boom as anything but a scar.
In early 2021, the DEC announced plans to enlist drone and magnetic surveillance technology to spot undocumented abandoned wells — a project made possible with $400,000 of funding from the NYS Energy Research and Development Authority and one that DEC spokesperson TJ Pignataro said will “help DEC efficiently identify [abandoned] wells” across the state.
Locating wells does not equate to plugging them, and as the DEC searches, costs mount, and methane continues to leak into both private and public lands.
“This problem is not going to go away,” Paul Plants said. “It should have been taken care of 50 years ago, and for every year that it waits now, a well that could have been plugged safely at a cheaper rate.”
Methodology
The data in this story is from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, Division of Mineral Resources via Open Data NY. We looked at two datasets in particular. The first dataset on abandoned and unplugged wells is updated annually. Counts of abandoned and unplugged wells in this story did not include wells with a “UM” designation, which were wells that the DEC could not locate. The remaining wells in the dataset were either located by the DEC or by other entities, like a construction project coming across a well.
The second dataset on all regulated wells in the state beginning in 1860 is updated daily; our analysis was done using the data downloaded on October 5, 2021. This dataset was filtered to only include three types of wells: gas wells, oil wells and storage wells, which are used to store gas underground. Other types of wells, like brine wells that collect salt, were not counted. Dry holes that don’t produce enough oil or gas for companies to complete their construction, were also omitted from our counts.
Of the total 31,185 oil, gas and storage wells in this dataset, only 4,476 wells had dates for both well completion and plugging. 52 of the rows had negative numbers because the date of plugging was recorded as earlier than the date of completion. These were omitted from the analysis. A DEC spokesperson said this may be because dry wells were never marked as completed for production, but were later noted as complete after the well was plugged. This could also be because wells were re-entered for further development after originally being plugged, they said.
The calculations and data for this analysis are available on GitHub.