Ohio has roughly 1,000 sites on its orphan well inventory. “There likely are many more,” said Eric Vendel, chief of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management. The hope is that drones equipped with magnetometers could help locate wells that are not yet on their radar–and raise awareness about how important it is to protect groundwater in this state from contamination by abandoned oil & gas infrastructure.
Abandoned oil and gas wells contaminate soil, groundwater, and air. They’re so dangerous that they can emit methane for over a decade without being properly sealed up – which is not the best situation when you consider how much more potent it is as an environmental pollutant than carbon dioxide in terms of its long-term impact on global warming.
In the last 20 years, remote-piloted aerial vehicles have been a growing trend. The expansion of their use has led to using them for surveys over larger areas. A magnetometer is typically used in these types of studies and looks like a yard long white surfboard that hangs from an unmanned drone with a wingspan size of 4 to 5 feet
Without an up-to-date inventory of our state’s wells, Ohio has been faced with the daunting task of tracking down old and unplugged oil or gas well sites. There are over 250,000 orphaned wells in the Buckeye State that we know about; more than half don’t even have a location on file! With so many potential threats to water resources out there—including active natural faults like those at Hilcorp’s fracking site near Cleveland—Ohio needed to take serious steps towards mapping all its abandoned drilling locations.
