After oil was discovered in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, oil production in the United States became a booming industry. Since then, the United States has been a leader in oil production worldwide. In 2023, the United States was producing, on average, 12.9 million barrels of crude oil per day from 1.1 million active wells spread across the country. These active wells are under strict regulations to protect the environment and the people working and living around them. What isn’t properly regulated is the huge number of orphaned wells in the United States.

The Government Accountability Office estimates that there are more than 2 million unplugged orphaned wells in the country. An orphaned well is one that has been abandoned by its owner for a number of reasons. The company could have gone out of business, or perhaps the well wasn’t producing optimally. Either way, it has been abandoned, and orphaned, with little to no documentation. These wells present a litany of concerns as they expel methane gas into the environment and leach chemicals into the surrounding ground and water sources.

Collaborations between numerous government and private organizations have come together to find ways of closing these orphaned wells under the umbrella of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which President Biden signed into law on November 15, 2021. The act provides $4.7 billion in funding to plug orphaned wells once they are located. The most recent data provided by the Environmental Defense Fund shows that there have been roughly 130,000 orphaned wells located in the United States, which means there are plenty more to find.

However, locating orphaned wells that have no documentation has proven to be a huge challenge. At the start of the oil revolution, New York was a major site for oil production, with thousands of wells mostly in the western and central regions of the state. As the state became more urbanized, the majority of these wells were simply abandoned and left to rot, becoming hidden by plant overgrowth. In 2020, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and the Department of Environmental Conservation began using drones to locate orphaned wells.

The first step was to gather local information layered with old maps. Once a possible region is determined, a drone is flown over the designated section in a grid, scanning the ground below. The drone’s thermal camera then reveals locations of possible well sites. Since then, drone technology has progressed, and other states have adopted the method for locating orphaned wells. One example is the collaboration of several national laboratories, led by the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

Perhaps best known as the birthplace of Robert Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb, LANL is one of 16 Department of Energy (DOE) research and development labs. In 2022, the DOE announced that it had tasked LANL with carrying out a new project called the Undocumented Orphan Well Research Program to mitigate the orphaned wells in the southwestern region of the United States. The DOE stated, “The Undocumented Orphan Well Research Program aims to develop technologies and methodologies to enable the finding and characterization of undocumented orphaned wells by determining their physical locations, methane emissions, wellbore integrity, and any additional environmental impacts.”

The project, led by Hari Viswanathan, is being funded with $30 million to develop new drone sensors capable of detecting wells that are hidden from sight. LANL explained that the 5-year drone program will “establish a collaborative framework via the consortium, develop and test new and existing technologies and processes in the field, create best practices for identification and characterization, and ultimately deploy these technologies at scale. The technological advancements under this program will help further the Biden administration’s goals to cut methane emissions 30% by 2030 compared to 2020 levels.”

Mr. Viswanathan went on to say, “Los Alamos National Lab and our consortium with other national labs have the capabilities to find these wells, which uses a combination of drones to fly above them and then try to detect them with different types of sensors. And then, when we get this data, we use artificial intelligence to try to find where the wells are.” Once located, separate government funding will be used to reclaim and plug the orphaned wells. Addressing the issue of orphaned wells is crucial for both environmental protection and public health. The innovative use of drone technology, supported by significant funding and collaborative efforts, represents a promising advancement in locating and lessening these hidden hazards.

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