Peeling red paint, broken pressure gauge, cranks on the ground… like hundreds of thousands of others, this western Canadian oil well had been shut down for several decades without ever being shut down.
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Most of these small boreholes, often dug hundreds of feet below the surface in search of Alberta’s rich oil and gas resources, are “eroding and degrading,” says activist Regan Boychuk.
And today they represent an ecological time bomb in Canada, where oil and gas remain kings and employ nearly 600,000 people.
“Each must be managed and monitored for eternity due to the risk of gas but also oil spilling into the surrounding groundwater,” adds the founder of Reclaim Alberta, an organization working to close these abandoned wells.
Photo: AFP
Of even greater concern, they continue to emit a very potent greenhouse gas: methane.
Over a 20-year period, it has “86 times the impact of a carbon dioxide molecule,” says McGill University’s Mary Kang, a specialist in the field.
And it is a likely “underestimated” source of pollution: “Given the number of wells, the margin of uncertainty is large,” adds the expert.
Photo: AFP
According to a 2022 federal report, more than 120,000 wells are inactive and unsealed in Alberta and Saskatchewan, the two provinces that contain 91% of Canada’s wells.
Collectively, they emit 16,000 tons of methane – 545,000 tons of carbon dioxide – annually for a century, equivalent to the annual emissions of around 237,000 cars.
Work postponed indefinitely
Most wells were constructed from the 1860s, when the oil industry began to boom, until the late 1940s, in a country that ranks fourth in the world for proven oil reserves.
But after decades of expansion, the 2010s saw a proliferation of dormant wells, particularly after the oil price collapse in 2014.
Photo: AFP
Under the so-called “polluter pays” principle, oil and gas companies are required to fund the sealing and cleaning of land, but there is no statutory time limit for doing so.
They are therefore postponing the renovation work indefinitely, the associations denounce. It’s still far cheaper for them to pay the property owner rent for even an inactive well than fund the thousands of dollars needed to clean it up.
Another scenario: Some wells become “orphans” when the company that manages them goes bankrupt. A headache for the authorities.
In a decade, the number of orphan wells in Alberta has exploded, from 700 in 2010 to nearly 10,000 by 2023. And Ottawa estimates that the cost of rehabilitating these wells will triple in five years, reaching at least 1.1 billion Canadian dollars (748 million euros) in 2025.
Alberta’s Orphan Wells Association, funded largely by oil companies, says it can remediate abandoned wells in 10 to 12 years.
Photo: AFP
Dirty floors
Albert Hummel, a southern Alberta farmer and rancher, had seven abandoned wells on his land. Five have finally closed, but two have yet to be cleaned up.
Photo: AFP
“It’s a long process, it takes time,” explains the farmer, who has also lost income from the rents paid for these wells since the oil company that ran them went bankrupt in 2019.
If the soil is contaminated, several decades must pass before the pollutants evaporate before work can begin.
After decontamination, the boreholes must then be sealed with a cement screed and the original condition restored. Each layer of earth is replaced and the ground leveled.
Installed in the middle of one of his fields, the remains of an oil well are still preventing Albert Hummel from working, causing “a loss of production,” he says bitterly, pointing to the pipes sticking out of the ground.
To compensate for this loss, a small company offers to install solar panels there and wait for them to be cleaned.
“There’s a little more time for pollutants to evaporate, while also generating renewable energy,” the proceeds of which benefit the landowner, explains RenuWell’s Daryl Bennett, pointing to the utility poles that could be recycled. .
But these solutions remain a drop in the bucket of the surfaces to be cleaned.
And “the greenhouse gas emissions from these infrastructures from the past are not going away,” notes Mary Kang. “We will have to manage them for decades to come.”