Jeff, last summer I was in Greece. It was hot and dry like California. I was bored and walked to the top of a hill overlooking the city. There in the shadow of the firs I saw members of the firebrigade resting, waiting to get the call. The calm of the hot afternoon was only interupted by curses and barks when the wild dogs got too close to the men.
"-May you only be bothered the dogs today"? I know not a word of Greece. Pity.

By MarkSHoyle (Bolo) on Thursday, January 16, 2025 - 06:21 pm: Edit

There is a short (10 Sec or so) video going around,
looks like taken from a satellite....
Shows 3 separate flare ups, that occur approximately the same time....

By A David Merritt (Adm) on Thursday, January 16, 2025 - 07:13 pm: Edit

Do the times coincide with when the Santa Ana winds kick up each day?
Note they calm down some over night.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Saturday, January 25, 2025 - 02:14 pm: Edit

Across the USA, there are 3.5 million abandoned oil and gas wells. Half of those are leaking methane (natural gas) and assorted toxic chemicals, and gas buildup inside structures can cause people in them to get sick and a few even die. The rest will eventually leak if not properly sealed. Worse, there are rare explosions which destroy buildings and kill people. If you think climate change is really caused by people, and to some extent it certainly is, then 3.5 million wells each leaking a bit of gas adds up to the equivalent of 2-4 millions of cars being driven around. Some abandoned wells poison ground water.

The situation is Canada is about the same. It is worse in Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Mexico where no environmental laws exist. Those countries do not publish data. There are thought to be 29 million abandoned wells worldwide.

It’s bad enough here; Pennsylvania has 330,000. Fourteen thousand abandoned wells are off shore and harder to seal. Real estate agents tell buyers that the abandoned well does not matter as the buyers as they can just call the government to take care of it. True, but it could be years.

How did this happen? When a well runs dry, and they all do, the owner shuts the valves and walks away. Eventually, the metal in the well rusts or corrodes away and you have a leak. There are so many of these wells that no one can even check them all. Even a full list of such wells doesn’t exist. Complicating this are abandoned pipelines that no one remembers. Some of the wells are so old no one can find them. Worse, methane is odorless; gas companies mix stinky stuff into natural gas so leaks become obvious. Abandoned wells don’t have stinky stuff added.

Some of these abandoned wells are a century old, others less than a year. Sometimes the owner went bankrupt, others just walked away and made a note to properly seal the well later, others did as recent laws require and turned over the cash bond they are required to post to local authorities and let them seal the wells. One issue is that the bond requirement isn’t enough money to properly seal the well and powerful oil and gas lobbyists stop legislation to increase the bond amount. Cities, towns, counties, and states know the wells need to be sealed but have no money after paying their Other bills.

Sealing such a well is a chore. You need to get some big equipment and a skilled crew, clean off the surface, pull the inner pipe out of the well, then fill the casing with special concrete. This has to be done in several stages weeks apart as each stage must dry before more is poured. So the crew has to return several times over three months. Selling the recovered steel pays only a tiny bit of the cost.

What to do? President Biden made a good start, allocating money to start sealing wells. It will take more than a decade, Congress only funded enough to do six percent of the wells, but will create 100,000 jobs. Texas has a similar program that will seal the wells in Texas over the next 11 years, and is struggling to force oil companies to seal newly empty wells in real time. (Texas seals about 700 old wells every year but has 8000 yet to be done.) We need more such programs, higher bond costs, and Trump effect threats to convince oil companies to voluntarily chip in a few billion. “Double the bonds or you get no permits.” The leaked gas isn’t enough to be commercially viable, maybe a clever engineer can find a way to make money here.

By Jeff Anderson (Jga) on Saturday, January 25, 2025 - 06:16 pm: Edit

"Dry" wells aren't exactly dry. They're just wells from which extracting a usable quantity of product isn't worth the energy required to extract it. There's still product down there, and it will continue to seep out.

Worse are those which could still in theory be productive, but to tap that product requires advanced methods.

Going further means `Gator territory.

By Mike Erickson (Mike_Erickson) on Saturday, January 25, 2025 - 06:56 pm: Edit

For some reason SVC's article reminds me of all the oil wells in southern California that have been capped and/or disguised.

--Mike

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Saturday, January 25, 2025 - 09:58 pm: Edit

It needs to be reminded that situations change.

Wells are abandoned for economic reasons.

It was stated above that wells are capped because it costs more to recover the oil than the value of the recovered oil had at the time.

Fracking proved that new technology changes the economics.

Bottomline, if the world price of oil increases above the cost to produce, it suddenly becomes economic to reopen those wells.

From day to day, the spot price of oil may not move much, if at all. But over time, huge changes in price, both up, as well as down occurs.

Fear the day when the price of oil goes up enough to make scavenging of every drop of oil becomes necessary.

By Carl-Magnus Carlsson (Hardcore) on Saturday, January 25, 2025 - 10:18 pm: Edit

I am mentally prepared; having played Twilight 2000 for years:D

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Saturday, January 25, 2025 - 10:51 pm: Edit

I would presume that the oil industry would prioritize sealing the ones least likely to be reopened if something new changes. A well abandoned in 1950 is unlikely to handle the pressures used in fraking.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Sunday, January 26, 2025 - 11:36 am: Edit

I certainly hope so.

Unfortunately, even big corporations make mistakes.

Diet Coke, The Ford Edsal, and wasn’t there some beer company that thought DEI and woke was the way to go?

By Mike Grafton (Mike_Grafton) on Sunday, January 26, 2025 - 11:51 am: Edit

The solution is to require a bonding company make the bond "sufficient to seal/ cap" the well instead of a fixed amount.

By Jeff Anderson (Jga) on Sunday, January 26, 2025 - 12:48 pm: Edit

Modern mines aren't allowed to start mining a seam of ore unless they have a plan already written out for how they're going to recondition the land back to its original state.

I've seen the results of these plans/operations, and they do look VERY good.

I don't know enough about the oil and natural gas industries to say for certain, but I would suspect they have similar regulations imposed on them regarding their end-of-life clean-up plans.

That just leaves the old ones.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, January 26, 2025 - 08:33 pm: Edit

No one is ever going to drill a well with the requirement to post a Grafton Bond that amounts to any amount the government wants to name decades in the future.

Congratulations, you just shut down the entire oil drilling industry.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Sunday, January 26, 2025 - 09:39 pm: Edit

And he did it as an illustration of the “Law of unintended consequences.”

Not bad.

It would have been more impressive, if Mike had intended to do it, in the first place.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, January 27, 2025 - 01:26 am: Edit

Sheer genius!

By Jeff Anderson (Jga) on Monday, January 27, 2025 - 11:26 am: Edit

Some insurance company will gamble on insuring a Grafton Bond won't become hyper outrageous. I mean, after all, despite the insanity around insuring properties in SoCal, there have been SOME companies that (until VERY recently) have been willing to offer policies for homes in fire risk areas...

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Monday, January 27, 2025 - 12:15 pm: Edit

There is a business model that might apply here:

Let’s, for lack of a better name, call it the “Pump, and dump, Oil Well Insurance Company.”

Jeff Anderson, CEO, CFO and janitor, opens said company amid huge fanfare and public acclaim as a “Better Planned Future” path way to assure future generations shall have a clean and toxic oil fume free existence.

Jeff, with the help of an army of temporary hourly workers, sell Grafton Bonds to Every oil well owner in California (and other states , and internationally).

Jeff, in his exuberance to help people, neglected, in his zeal, to complete a few steps.

Namely, he didn’t wait for the bureaucrats in Washington DC, Sacremento, Ca. Or, frankly anywhere else on the planet to register or even seek advise on how to legally establish his business.

He cashed the huge number of checks, had a few celebrity endorsements along with the entrepreneur of the year award dinners and (artfully donning a new identity) left the country looking for a tropical country that does not have extradition treaties with the U.S. or the state of California.

The new “Not Jeff Anderson” consequently spends the rest of his life sunning on a beautiful sandy beach sipping a seemingly endless supply of tropical fruit drinks.

Seems fool proof.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, January 27, 2025 - 06:26 pm: Edit

I think the way around the Grafton Bond issue is to set up an LLC for each well and file bankruptcy when asked to pay their bond.

I might note that a Grafton Bond is a very strange animal. Normally when you drill a well you are required to deposit cash with a bonding company. The current requirement isn’t enough to seal the well and their lobbyists won’t allow them to be required to post more money. A Grafton Bond is for an indeterminate amount. How do I put an unknown amount in a bonding company account? I guess someone is going to have to GUESS how much I have to post, which goes back to the problem of lobbyists fighting the total. No insurance company is going to write a policy that says it will pay, on some unknown date in the future, whatever amount the government says it wants. A future Trump might allow an oil company to pay only a pittance for a plywood box around the closed valve, but a future Biden might demand enough to bankrupt the oil company because that’s a good way to switch to renewable energy.

By Jeff Anderson (Jga) on Monday, January 27, 2025 - 09:33 pm: Edit

Most insurance companies would expect the future B, but there may be a couple that would bet on a future T.

(BTW, JSW? I'm too risk-averse to be the CEO, CFO, NOSOBIC* of such a company... )

(* NOSOBIC is an acronym I came up with some... Thirty or so years ago. It stretches out to "Number One Son Ova B In Charge." Yeah, stupid and immature, but it was fun at the time... )

By Mike Grafton (Mike_Grafton) on Tuesday, January 28, 2025 - 07:40 am: Edit

1) The bonding companies aren't idiots; they will have their own engineers and actuaries. Builders get them all the time and and it's not a big deal.

2) All SVC is saying is that oil companies just blow off the capping requirement.

3) Technology improves over time. Perhaps they figure out how to cap a well by injecting "lean mix" cement directly into the well casings and then welding over the top. Skip the expensive 'Yank the casing" part entirely?

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, January 28, 2025 - 05:05 pm: Edit

I have actually gotten such bonds in the past when I did construction work. The bonding companies want a very specific dollar amount and I never ever met one that would give an open-ended guarantee of an unknown number. Well, they might, but they would include a cap, a finite limit.

Some oil companies avoid doing the capping/sealing thing by various means, others do their duty. I never said it was all one way.

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Tuesday, January 28, 2025 - 05:16 pm: Edit

Last I heard there is still at least one fire going on California. Seems like every time they start ti get a handle on them a ew one springs to life in the underbrush from embers borne by the winds. Hopefully the forecast rain will ease thiings somewhat with not too many mudslides which is another catastrophe in t he wings.

By Jeff Anderson (Jga) on Tuesday, January 28, 2025 - 09:34 pm: Edit

Always remember that California has different seasons than the sane world does. In California, you have...

Brushfire Season

Mudslide Season

Earthquake Season

And Riot Season.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, January 28, 2025 - 11:56 pm: Edit

For good or bad, President Trump has stopped most money to the California government until they adopt forestry and water management policies that will help prevent wildfires. California says no fair, we want to have any policy we want and still send the Feds the bill.

For reference, your insurance company is going to refuse to pay your claim the third time your holiday bonfires got out of control and burned down your property.

Be VERY careful in discussing this subject, or better yet just don’t discuss it here.

By Douglas Lampert (Dlampert) on Tuesday, January 28, 2025 - 11:58 pm: Edit

I occassionally tell the story of my last week in Berkeley, I was walking to a store and noticed people boarding up windows on stores. I was unaware of any reason to expect riots or unrest (this was some time after the Rodney King riots and the more local People's Park riots), so I asked one of the people boarding up a window why he was doing so.

"It's Friday."

And this is part of the reason I rarely regret leaving.