IDENTIFYING AND CHARACTERIZING UNDOCUMENTED ORPHANED WELLS TO MITIGATE METHANE MISSIONS AND GROUNDWATER IMPACTS (Invited Presentation)

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) requested the DOE develop a program focused around reducing the impact of undocumented orphaned wells (UOWs). Orphaned wells are defined as an idle well for which the operator is unknown or insolvent. There are an estimated hundreds of thousands of UOWs leaking methane in the United States with unknown locations. The Consortium Advancing Technology for Assessment of Lost Oil & Gas Wells (CATALOG) program aims to locate and characterize UOWs to quantify methane emissions, wellbore integrity, and other environmental impacts of wells to prioritize plugging and abandoning activities by State and Federal agencies. Identifying and characterizing UOWs is a grand challenge requiring novel signature science capabilities such as drones carrying multiple sensors such as magnetometers, methane detectors and lidar to pick up the often-faint signatures. Machine learning is used to extract signal from these multiple noisy data sets to locate UOWs.