27,000 abandoned oil gas wells in Gulf

[mooncliff]

Leading environmental groups and a U.S. senator on Wednesday called on the government to pay closer attention to more than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells in the Gulf of Mexico and take action to keep them from leaking even more crude into water already tainted by the massive BP spill.
The calls for action follow an Associated Press investigation that found federal regulators do not typically inspect plugging of these offshore wells or monitor for leaks afterward. Yet tens of thousands of oil and gas wells are improperly plugged on land, and abandoned wells have sometimes leaked offshore too, state and federal regulators acknowledge.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT

[don]

Re: 27,000 abandoned oil gas wells in Gulf

more than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells in the Gulf of Mexico

Suggesting as the pols chant "Drill, Baby' Drill" the oil companies whisper, "We already have".

[reggie]

Re: 27,000 abandoned oil gas wells in Gulf

"Even depleted production wells can repressurize over time and spill oil if their sealings fail."

Would it make sense to extract the oil from these wells that have "repressurized" for commercial use, particularly in light of the King of Saudi Arabia cutting exports?

[reallife]

Re: 27,000 abandoned oil gas wells in Gulf

It is doubtful that underwater stripper wells could ever make a profit.

[mooncliff]

Re: 27,000 abandoned oil gas wells in Gulf

Now that the divorce is final between Matt Simmons and the boutique investment bank he took public in 1974, the outspoken energy guru is free to pursue his latest passion — offshore wind.
His exit from Simmons & Co. followed a prediction published in Fortune that by mid-July BP Plc would realize the severity of the Gulf of Mexico disaster and the associated clean-up costs, panic and file for Chapter 11.
http://houston.bizjournals.com/houst...12/story1.html

Offshore wind
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...tand-tall.html

[GRG55]

Re: 27,000 abandoned oil gas wells in Gulf

It is doubtful that underwater stripper wells could ever make a profit.

I doubt there's 27,000 abandoned offshore wells. At the moment there's only 1527 producing gas wells and 3286 producing oil wells on Federal lands in the Gulf of Mexico. The industry would have long given up drilling offshore Gulf of Mexico if it had to drill 32,000 offshore wells to get fewer than 5,000 successful producers.

I think the reporters are making no distinction between onshore and offshore abandonments...

[However, I will make the tongue-in-cheek observation that if the statistic is accurate then the drilling moratorium is having a much bigger impact on jobs than we might have imagined, since six wells have to be drilled to get one successful producer]

[Rajiv]

Re: 27,000 abandoned oil gas wells in Gulf

I doubt there's 27,000 abandoned offshore wells.

Are you including the wells dug by Pemex in the Cantarell field -- the one that has now peaked? Possibly the 27000 abandoned wells included Pemex figures as well.

The gulf as an ecosystem does not respect national boundaries.

[GRG55]

Re: 27,000 abandoned oil gas wells in Gulf

I doubt there's more than 300 wells total in Cantarell, including the nitrogen injection wells. The original production development had 40 producing wells with peak production of just over one million barrels per day in 1981. At the beginning of this century Pemex embarked on the nitrogen injection scheme that brought a second production peak of more than 2 million barrels per day in 2004. The last major development investment in Cantarell added 20 wells in 2008.

The adjacent Ku-Maloob-Zaap complex has 132 wells.

These are Mexico's two largest offshore fields by a wide margin.


The 27,000 figure remains highly suspect as an offshore well count imo.

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Edit added: Sequence at Cantarell was 40 wells in 1981, 139 development wells drilled between 1981 and 1996, a 213 well [including nitrogen injection wells] secondary recovery program between 1997 and 2005, and 20 additional wells in 2008...for a total of 412 wells.

[Rajiv]

Re: 27,000 abandoned oil gas wells in Gulf

In that case the most likely source of the 27000 abandoned wells was probably a typo with an added zero that propagated through some publication, and was then quoted etc. etc.

[GRG55]

Re: 27,000 abandoned oil gas wells in Gulf

Perhaps, but I think that the more likely explanation is that the reporter is unable [or unwilling] to distinguish between offshore wells and onshore wells in the "Gulf of Mexico region"...e.g. those in lower parts of the States of Texas, Louisiana, etc.


From the article in the first post on this thread:

"...Yet tens of thousands of oil and gas wells are improperly plugged on land, and abandoned wells have sometimes leaked offshore too, state and federal regulators acknowledge..."

[we_are_toast]

Re: 27,000 abandoned oil gas wells in Gulf

In that case the most likely source of the 27000 abandoned wells was probably a typo with an added zero that propagated through some publication, and was then quoted etc. etc.

The original AP report:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/...1XwLgD9GPVQ0G1

Companies may be tempted to skimp on sealing jobs, which are expensive and slow offshore. It would cost the industry at least $3 billion to permanently plug the 10,500 now-active wells and the 3,500 temporarily abandoned ones in the Gulf, according to an AP analysis of MMS data. Many such jobs take more than $200,000 and 10 days. Difficult jobs in deep water can cost several million dollars, and some companies own hundreds of wells.

The AP analysis indicates that more than half of the 50,000 wells ever drilled on federal leases beneath the Gulf have now been abandoned. Some 23,500 are permanently sealed. Another 12,500 wells are plugged on one branch while being allowed to remain active in a different branch.