California Regulators Approve More Oil Well Permits Amid a Crisis of Leaking Oil Wells that Should be Plugged

FracTracker’s in-the-field inspections and updated analysis of CalGEM permit data shows that California’s regulatory practices and permitting policies continue to put frontline communities at risk of exposure to degraded air quality from the emissions of VOCs from oil and gas wellsites. Additionally state inspectors have been failing to complete on-site investigations of well sites for leaks and other violations. This article explores the CalGEM permitting data for idle wells in California and discusses the California regulatory practices that have led to many leaking wells throughout the state. The article also includes an interactive map of the 49 leaking wells recently identified by the regulator CalGEM in June 2022.

Permit Tracking

Fractracker Alliance and Consumer Watchdog have updated the maps and figures on NewsomWellWatch.com that track California’s oil and gas well permitting trends. The most updated data for the second quarter of 2022 shows that the California Department of Geological Energy Management (CalGEM) has increased the number of oil and gas well rework permits issued, as compared to the previous year. Many of these wells that are being reworked present an immediate risk of leaks and casing failures, and should therefore be plugged and abandoned rather than reworked. Idle wells have not received the necessary oversight to prevent them from leaking in California, and regulators have not required long-term idle wells to be plugged and properly abandoned. CalGEM Permits for Idle Wells

This quarter’s CalGEM permit tracking update shows that permits for reworking oil and gas wells are up 124% as compared to 2021, see Table 1 below. Rework operations repair issues with oil and gas wells that occur downhole, in the annulus of the wellbore. These types of repairs are sometimes necessary to prevent casing failures and other hazardous issues. Reworks are also sometimes used to improve the flow of oil production out of a  well. For both these reasons, reworks can be an option for wells that should otherwise be plugged and properly abandoned. Oil and gas companies, known colloquially as operators, may conduct rework operations to avoid the closure costs associated with plugging a well and remediating the wellsite. In fact, 31% of the wells reworked in 2022 were already idle.

Table 1. Analysis of counts of permits issued by CalGEM for the second quarter of 2022.

Looking a bit deeper into the data, of the 1,400 idle wells that received rework permits from 2019-2021, over 70% of them remain idle today, and only 26% of them are currently active, meaning that the majority are not being reworked in order to resume production. Instead they are being reworked to fix minor issues and to also avoid plugging and closure costs. Additionally, while wellsites are undergoing rework operations they are exempt from California emissions regulations such as the Greenhouse Gas Emission Standards for Crude Oil and Natural Gas Facilities, Subarticle 13 of the California Code of Regulations, Title 17, Division 3, Chapter 1, Subchapter 10 Climate Change, Article 4. This regulation, known as the California oil and gas rule, or the methane rule, is the only regulation for emissions for most neighborhood drill sites. This exemption allows idle wellsites to be serious sources of unregulated air pollution for up to 90 days at a time.

CalGEM Idle Well Inspections

Filming the Leaking Wells using a FLIR Optical Gas Imaging Camera

In a rapid response to the initial reports of leaking idle wells, FracTracker Alliance visited Bakersfield to conduct its own inspections of the leaking well sites. Armed with a FLIR Teledyne optical gas imaging (OGI) camera and certifications in optical gas imaging field work, FracTracker worked with the Central California Environmental Justice Network to identify and inspect idled and potentially orphaned wells that could be leaking near communities and homes. The map below of Bakersfield shows the locations of the leaking oil wells discovered by CalGEM, as well as the rest of the other 40,000 idle oil and gas wells in the state (nearly 12,000 located within 3,200 feet of a home or community).