How To Find Abandoned Oil And Gas Wells

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.

Covering plugging of holes to preserve fresh water supplies, this book also details the how tos for plugging and abandonment with information on everything from materials and locating abandoned wells to current state rules for oil and gas wells, as well as water wells.

An estimated 12 million wells have been drilled during the 150 years of oil and gas production in the United States. Many old oil and gas fields are now populated areas where the presence of improperly plugged wells may constitute a hazard to residents. Natural gas emissions from wells have forced people from their houses and businesses and have caused explosions that injured or killed people and destroyed property. To mitigate this hazard, wells must be located and properly plugged, a task made more difficult by the presence of houses, businesses, and associated utilities. This paper describes well finding methods conducted by the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) that were effective at two small towns in Wyoming and in a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.