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What to do about idle Alaska wells AOGCC plans to work with oil companies to identify which unused wells have no future potential and should be plugged, abandoned ALAN BAILEY Petroleum News
The Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission is starting to address some worries over the large number of oil and gas wells in the state that are unused but that have not been plugged and abandoned. Some of these wells may have future, perhaps unknown, value. Others, on the other hand, could usefully be closed in before they age to a point of becoming a safety or environmental hazard.
Idle wells
During a meeting of the commission on March 1 Dave Roby, an AOGCC senior reservoir engineer, reviewed the situation regarding what the commission terms “idle wells,” wells which have not been used for production or injection during the previous calendar year but which have an active status as an oil or gas producer, or as some type of injector. AOGCC is concerned about these wells because of the possibility of an idle well becoming a problem well if it is not properly monitored and maintained, and because of the possibility of a significant liability arising if an operator cannot deal with an obsolete well in a timely fashion, Roby said.
Plugging and abandoning a well can be a very expensive undertaking.
Increased then stabilized Over the past decade the number of idle wells has increased from about 500 to a little over 700, Roby said. But that increase took place in the first half of the decade, with the number of idle wells stabilizing at between 700 and 740 over the past five years. The reason for that recent stability is unknown but may related to an uptick in the number of well workovers that have been conducted by companies such as BP and Hilcorp.
Under AOGCC regulations operators must report on idle wells each year. The latest idle well census, coming from the operator reports for 2015, indicates that there were 736 wells that had remained shut-in for the whole of that year, Roby said. Of these, 468 were producers, 264 were injectors and four were water supply wells, he said. The well that had been shut-in the longest, a well on one of the Cook Inlet offshore platforms, had been inactive since June 1978. At least 55 of the wells had been idle since before 2000, Roby said.
The median shut-in date was approximately January 2012, meaning that about 360 of the wells had been shut-in for more than four years.
The well operators have indicated that future plans for about 250 idle wells can be some variant of no plan, no future utility or under evaluation, Roby said. About 10 wells have been flagged for plugging and abandonment, he said.
AOGCC proposals AOGCC is considering revising the requirements for idle wells and, as a first step, requested some additional information about the wells when it sent out its request for the 2016 idle wells report, Roby said. In particular, the commission has asked for reasons for the well being idle and for condition codes for the wells. Other possible steps include revising the idle well regulations and having meetings with the operators to discuss how to deal with the wells, he said.
Roby said that, while there is clearly an issue of not wanting to plug wells that may have some future application, there appear to be about 250 wells that the companies say have no future utility.
Commission Chair Cathy Foerster said that the commission has already started a process with BP, to identify a handful of wells that the company can agree need to be plugged, so that the company can commit to plugging a certain number of wells this year. The commission wants to work cooperatively with the operators in dealing with the idle well issue and sees the BP exercise as a means of helping figure out a workable process, Foerster said.
The commission will probably hold a couple of meetings with the operators, to share their thoughts on how best to proceed: how to identify which wells to plug, how to figure out which wells may have future utility, Foerster said.
Commissioner Hollis French wondered whether it would be useful to set targets for the maximum number of idle wells each year going forward. Maintaining a target of, say, 500 wells would involve plugging and abandoning many wells each year. But, without targets, the number of idle wells might climb to problematic levels, he suggested.
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