The Louisiana Department of Conservation and Energy is launching a massive effort to plug and clean up orphaned oil and gas well sites. Spokesman Patrick Courreges says the department will use $30 million in federal funding to clean up the sites in north Louisiana.
“The wells tend to be shallower and less pressure on them, so you tend to be able to get more sites cleaned up per dollar spent,” Courreges explained.
The department will use state funding to clean up orphaned well sites in south Louisiana. Courreges says it’s important to get these orphaned well sites plugged and cleaned so that they don’t cause any problems down the road.
“Anytime you have that connection between the surface and somewhere underground, you need to get that addressed; you need to get that pathway cut off if nobody’s actually making use of it,” Courreges noted.
Courreges says the Monroe and Shreveport districts contain more than 4,200 of the state’s roughly 6,400 orphaned wells.
“You still have that backlog of wells from a couple of generation’s worth of drilling where, when an operator went under, they sometimes they went under and left their wellheads behind,” Courreges said.
Lafayette-based Lemoine Disaster Recovery and Houston-based Garner Environmental Services will lead the first phase. The overall effort will take three to five years to complete.