On a suburban side road about 15 minutes from the center of Charleston, West Virginia, there’s a quiet hissing sound, almost completely masked by traffic noise coming from Interstate 64.
The orphaned oil well is hard to find. But David McMahon has heard old oil wells make this sound before.
“It's the sound of the gas escaping,” he said.
McMahon, a lawyer and co-founder of the West Virginia Surface Owners’ Rights Organization, waded through a mess of wild grape vines and Virginia creeper, wishing he’d brought a machete to cut through it. With him was Ted Boettner, a senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute.
As they got closer, the odor hit.
“I smelled it just now. Smells like sulfur, rotten eggs,” Boettner said. He’d just written a report on orphaned oil wells.
They pulled back vines to reveal an old, unassuming, 4-foot-tall metal structure. It looked like a scuba tank, topped with some metal connector pieces. It was an oil well from 1939. It likely stopped being useful decades ago, but was never plugged.
It’s “orphaned” because the company in charge of it is long gone. Now it’s the state’s problem.
By law, operators are required to plug old wells, but enforcement was lax for decades. Today, the state has one inspector for every 6,700 wells.
The Ohio River Valley Institute just put out a report that estimates there are a couple hundred thousand old oil wells in the state that need plugging. And most of them haven’t even been recorded.
When wells like this one sit unplugged, hissing and smelling, they cause a whole host of problems.
“Methane leaks out of them into the atmosphere, but also oil and water can leak out of them onto a farmer's land,” McMahon said.
Methane is a potent planet-warming gas, and a major player in climate change. Leaks on farm land poison soil and water, harming crops and livestock.
They can also penetrate coal seams, creating a danger; if a coal miner runs into an oil well, it can explode or leak and poison miners.
“The methane can go down into people's groundwater. I've seen people light their faucet in their sinks,” McMahon said.
