PA Environment Digest

Share this:

Chesapeake Bay Journal: Volunteer Laurie Barr Leads Hunt For Abandoned Conventional Oil & Gas Wells In Pennsylvania

By Ad Crable

Do you smell it?” Laurie Barr yelled as she tromped through an overgrown bottomland between remote wooded mountains in state game lands northeast of State College, PA.

She had whiffed the rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulfide and was soon at the foot of a tire-size round puddle of water seeping onto the surface. The pool was audibly burping bubbles.

A hot spring, perhaps? No. Barr proved it by holding a small clump of dry grass, lighting it and suspending it briefly over the bubbling seep. With a puff, flames danced above the water for a few seconds.

Methane, escaping from an abandoned gas well, was the cause. Its iron wellhead lay about 50 feet away, also discharging polluted water and methane.

Trails converged on the oozing puddle from several directions, made by white-tailed deer that crave the salt from the briny water.

The uncontrolled leak also contained arsenic, which flows into a stream that ultimately leads to the Chesapeake Bay.

It was only the second time she had lit an abandoned well to prove a point, a short demonstration for which she was approved by the Pennsylvania Fish and Game Commission.

She will still be criticized for the act, she predicted. “People will say, ‘You could have burned the forest down!’ But people need to see things. You can’t just tell people about things. They won’t listen.”

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, estimated to be 80 times more damaging to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide but not as long lasting.

For the last 13 of her 64 years, Barr has devoted much of her life to searching for, and making public, the hundreds of thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells in Pennsylvania that were never properly capped and continue to spew methane and toxins into the air and water.

She has become a well-known crusader — and thorn in the side of drillers — for finding and urging the proper sealing of the abandoned wells that pock Pennsylvania.

She has recruited a small team of volunteers more than willing to follow her into the woods and even urban areas to find lost or unplugged wells. They have found some underwater, in yards and even under buildings.

But make no mistake, the Save Our Streams PA nonprofit group she founded in 2010 has been mostly a one-woman show of impassioned purpose.

The commercial photographer and graphics designer, who lives with her dog on a small farm in Ulysses [Potter County] in the northcentral Pennsylvania mountains, has worn out two vehicles in the process — bouncing along back roads in search of wells, traveling to rallies and testifying before legislative bodies.

She’s also been sued twice and chased from oil and gas rigs on public lands.

She and her team of volunteers have found more than 1,000 lost and unplugged oil and gas wells, which they promptly reported to the state Department of Environmental Protection.

Acting DEP Secretary Jessica Shirley acknowledges that these wells are nothing less than “ticking time bombs.”

Fifty-four of the wells they have reported have been plugged with concrete to stop methane and pollution leaks.

That may not seem like a high percentage, but consider that, to date, only about 3,000 of an estimated 350,000-750,000 abandoned wells have been plugged by DEP.

The effort is gaining momentum, though, with hundreds of millions of dollars pledged to Pennsylvania under the federal Infrastructure Investment Act.

The state’s earliest wells date from the 1850s, more than 100 years before oil and gas drillers needed a permit or were even required to report the well’s existence to the state. Before 1956, neither were required.

Some wells are now just holes in the ground, their metal casings long gone — scavenged for money or removed during World War II for the war effort.

Barr is aware of the lack of funding and of the sheer number of unplugged wells. And she acknowledges that many thousands of them will not be plugged for generations, if ever.

But someone, she insists, needs to speak up about the problem.

“Yes, I get very frustrated,” she said. “But nobody was talking about abandoned wells in 2011. And most people know what an abandoned well is now. It’s not just me. I’ve had a lot of help and support and there are [a] lot of people working on abandoned well issues now that weren’t doing it when we first started.”

Early on, Barr had concentrated her energies against the nascent fracking (hydraulic fracturing) industry — until 2010, when, in separate incidents, two homes exploded from the buildup of methane gas escaping from abandoned conventional wells.

It shocked and horrified her, and drove home the realization that the abandoned well problem was far from public knowledge. So she shifted gears.

She is now a self-taught citizen scientist, tossing around arcane terms like “jerker rod” and “pump jack” to describe well rigs.

She sometimes overlays satellite photos with old oil and gas industry maps to steer her to likely spots.

She urges geocaching enthusiasts to look for wells and organizes regular “scavenger hunts,” inviting the public to join her on forays.

Barr’s efforts are funded by $10,000 yearly from a private anonymous donor.

Now, severe arthritis and brittle bone disease have forced her to slow down, and she spends more time training younger people willing to carry on the quest.

She also wants to write a memoir about her experiences and the legacy environmental problem that may never go away.

One focus of the book, she said, will be about the failure of DEP as a regulatory agency to solve the problem.

“[DEP needs] to be replaced,” she said. “They’ve bitten off more than they can chew. They are not functioning at the level they need, they are not funded at the level they need and they are not staffed at the level they need. They are dysfunctional”

(Reprinted from Chesapeake Bay Journal.)

[Note: So far in 2024, DEP has issued 830 notices of violation to conventional oil and gas well owners for abandoning their wells, a routine business practice to avoid plugging liability. Read more here.]

PA Oil & Gas Industry Public Notice Dashboards:

-- PA Oil & Gas Weekly Compliance Dashboard - Nov. 9 to 15 - Failed Well Pluggings; Leaking Gas Storage Area Wells; More Abandoned Conventional, Shale Gas Wells [PaEN]

-- PA Oil & Gas Industrial Facilities: Permit Notices, Opportunities To Comment - November 16 [PaEN]

-- DEP Posted 60 Pages Of Permit-Related Notices In November 16 PA Bulletin [PaEN]

Related Articles This Week:

-- Moms Clean Air Force: Pennsylvanians Call On State Leaders For Protection From Fossil Fuel And Plastic Industry Expansion [PaEN]

-- Guest Essay: Our Children’s Health Isn’t Partisan, Pennsylvania Needs Strong Pollution Protections From Fracking Now - By Rachel Sica Meyer, Beaver County Resident, Moms Clean Air Force [PaEN]

-- Chesapeake Bay Journal: Volunteer Laurie Barr Leads Hunt For Abandoned Conventional Oil & Gas Wells In Pennsylvania - By Ad Crable [PaEN]

-- FracTracker Alliance Announces 2024 Community Sentinel Award Recipients To Be Honored Dec. 4 [PaEN]

-- Environmental Hearing Board Issues Temporary Supersedeas To Stop The Opening Of Catalyst Energy, Inc. Oil & Gas Wastewater Injection Well In McKean County Until Hearing On Full Supersedeas [PaEN]

-- Low Streamflow Conditions Prompt Susquehanna River Basin Commission To Advise Shale Gas Drillers, Water Systems, Companies With Water Withdrawal Approvals To Plan For Alternative Operations [PaEN]

-- Utility Dive: North American Electric Reliability Corp: Natural Gas Electric Generation Is Threatened This Winter By Ongoing Concerns About Gas Production, Delivery In Extreme Weather Conditions [PaEN]