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Oil prices fell by fifty percent during the latter half of 2014, tumbling from a high of $105 per barrel in June to a mere $53 per barrel by year's end. As a result of sustained depressed commodities prices, more than 350 North American oil and gas operators and service companies filed for bankruptcy between January 2015 and September 2019, representing more than $162 billion of debt. Despite the existence of federal and state statutes ensuring that operators decommission wells at the end of economic life, these environmental laws frequently lose efficacy in bankruptcy proceedings. This unresolved conflict, among other contributing factors, has led to the existence of tens of thousands of "orphaned wells" in the United States. This thesis paper examines the bankruptcies of American oil and gas operators after the precipitous decline in oil prices to determine whether operators successfully discharged decommissioning liability during bankruptcy. A survey of 2015 bankruptcies shows that 33% of oil and gas operating companies abandoned properties with unmet decommissioning liability and created 285 new orphan wells in eight states. This paper also estimates the cost to plug and abandon wells orphaned from bankruptcies between 2015 and 2019 at more than $200 million. The paper concludes with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of several possible solutions to the orphan well problem
This open access book offers a timely guide to challenges and current practices to permanently plug and abandon hydrocarbon wells. With a focus on offshore North Sea, it analyzes the process of plug and abandonment of hydrocarbon wells through the establishment of permanent well barriers. It provides the reader with extensive knowledge on the type of barriers, their functioning and verification. It then discusses plug and abandonment methodologies, analyzing different types of permanent plugging materials. Last, it describes some tests for verifying the integrity and functionality of installed permanent barriers. The book offers a comprehensive reference guide to well plugging and abandonment (P&A) and well integrity testing. The book also presents new technologies that have been proposed to be used in plugging and abandoning of wells, which might be game-changing technologies, but they are still in laboratory or testing level. Given its scope, it addresses students and researchers in both academia and industry. It also provides information for engineers who work in petroleum industry and should be familiarized with P&A of hydrocarbon wells to reduce the time of P&A by considering it during well planning and construction.