Chipped red paint, broken pressure gauge, cranks on the ground… like hundreds of thousands of others, this western Canadian oil well has been shut down for several decades without ever having been shut down.
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Most of these small boreholes, often dug hundreds of meters below the surface in search of Alberta’s rich oil and gas deposits, are “eroding and degrading,” says activist Regan Boychuk.
And today they constitute an ecological time bomb in Canada where oil and gas remain kings, employing nearly 600,000 people.
“Each must be managed, monitored for eternity because of the risk of leaks” of gas but also of oil in the surrounding groundwater, adds the founder of Reclaim Alberta, an organization which fights for the closure of these abandoned wells.
Photo: AFP
Even more worryingly, they continue to emit a very powerful greenhouse gas: methane.
Over twenty years, it has “86 times more impact than a molecule of carbon dioxide”, underlines Mary Kang of McGill University, specialist in the subject.
And it is a source of pollution probably “underestimated”: “the margin of uncertainty is large” given the number of wells, adds the expert.
Photo: AFP
More than 120,000 wells are inactive and unsealed in Alberta and Saskatchewan, the two provinces that are home to 91% of Canadian wells, according to a 2022 federal report.
Combined, they emit 16,000 tonnes of methane – 545,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide – per year over a century, the equivalent of the annual emissions of around 237,000 cars.
Work postponed indefinitely
Most of the wells were built from the 1860s, when the oil industry began to boom, until the late 1940s, in a country that ranks fourth in the world in terms of proven oil reserves.
But after decades of expansion, inactive wells multiplied in the 2010s, especially after the oil price fell in 2014.
Photo: AFP
Under the so-called “polluter pays” principle, oil and gas companies are required to finance the sealing and cleaning of land, but no legislation sets a deadline for doing so.
They therefore postpone the sanitation work indefinitely, denounce the associations. It remains much cheaper for them to pay rent to the owner of the land even for an inactive well than to finance the thousands of dollars necessary for the cleaning.
Another scenario: some wells become “orphans” when the company that manages them goes bankrupt. A headache for the authorities.
In the space of ten years, Alberta has seen the number of orphan wells explode, rising from 700 in 2010 to nearly 10,000 in 2023. And Ottawa estimates that the cost of cleaning up these wells will triple in five years, to reach at least 1.1 billion Canadian dollars (748 million euros) in 2025.
Alberta’s Orphan Wells Association, mostly funded by oil companies, says it can clean up orphan wells within 10 to 12 years.
Photo: AFP
Polluted soils
Albert Hummel, a farmer and rancher from southern Alberta, had seven abandoned boreholes on his land. Five have finally been closed but there are still two to clean up.
Photo: AFP
“It’s a long process, it takes time,” explains the farmer who has also lost income from the rents paid for these wells since the oil company that operated them went bankrupt in 2019.
When the soil is contaminated, several decades have to pass for the pollutants to evaporate before work can begin.
Once decontaminated, the boreholes must then be sealed with a cement screed and the site restored to its original state. Each layer of earth is put back in place and the ground leveled.
Installed in the middle of one of his fields, the remains of an oil well still prevent Albert Hummel from working, causing “a loss of production”, he says bitterly, pointing to the pipes that come out of the ground.
To compensate for this loss, a small business is offering to install solar panels there while waiting for them to be cleaned.
“It gives a little more time for contaminants to evaporate, while producing renewable energy” whose income goes to the landowner, explains Daryl Bennett of the company RenuWell, pointing to the electricity poles which could be recycled. .
But these solutions remain a drop in the ocean of sites to be cleaned.
And “the greenhouse gas emissions from these infrastructures inherited from the past will not disappear”, notes Mary Kang. “We will still have to manage them for decades to come.”