Gulf awash in 27,000 abandoned wells, screamed the headline. That was just the beginning...
More than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells lurk in the hard rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental minefield that has been ignored for decades.
OMG, OMG...We're ALL GOING TO DIE...!!!!
Except not so much.
While there are a few tens of thousands of plugged and abandoned wells in the Gulf, there are orders of magnitude more plugged and abandoned wells on land around the U.S., a great many of them drilled and abandoned LONG before down-hole technology reached anything like the high levels we now know. I've owned land that had one such well on it, marked on my survey. I once looked for it. It was impossible to find.
Chances are great that, if you went looking for a similar plugged and abandoned well, you, too, would never find it. There are great reasons for that. They were made safe. Long ago. Old oil fields are not minefields, despite what the AP hyperventilists tell you. If you doubt that, I have old oil fields and old minefields you can explore.
Some of the reasons that old wells are safe is because they are carefully abandoned, and they were abandoned because they no longer produce any gas or oil. Not only that, but some of them NEVER produced any gas or oil...or anything else. Some few of them DID produce, but not for long under formation pressure. Those are the kind you see with the "rocking-horse" pump-jacks, pulling up petroleum out of a zone with too little pressure to drive it to the surface...some essentially have no greater pressure than our atmosphere at ground level. Still others produced oil and/or gas for a time, then were converted to injection wells, which return in the ground the highly saturated brine that most oil wells produce as a by-product. By injecting that brine into the same zone as producing wells are drawing from, the brine is used to drive more oil through the formation and to the producing well-bores.
When I was a boy, I visited the La Brea Tar Pits, not too far from my home. It was, by some definitions, a very old wild well. It didn't scare me then, but I didn't have AP writers hyping nonsense, either.
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But think of the environment. Oil's just not natural.
ReplyDeleteYou know, John, I remember as a kid we used kerosene or diesel as a specific for burns and stuff. In my parents' day, it was the base for a lot of home remedies.
ReplyDeleteNow, an open bucket of kerosene is cause for a Haz-Mat call-out. Our society has gone nuts...
We had a draw medicine that was a resin looking stick that you would light with a match and drip on a bandage to pull out deep splinters and the like. It was from the thrirties at least and worked like a charm. It was called Griswold's Salve and I did a little research a few years back that showed they stopped making it because it had oleate of lead as a trace ingredient.
ReplyDeleteNever mind the fact that it worked better than anything on the market now or that you have a greater exposure to lead by holding a sinker in your hand.
Most environmental nonsense is anti-rational, and posses a great threat to humanity.
ReplyDeleteCome 'n listen to a story 'bout a man named Rags
ReplyDeleteA poor barrister, barely kep' his money bags
Then one day he was shootin' at some illegal alien dude
When up from the ground come a bubblin' crude
At which time the EPA slapped a haz mat warning sign on his land and condemned it.
Heh...
ReplyDeleteMoney bags, indeed...! If you only knew the irony there...
Your ointment kind of reminds me of this stuff:
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthammol
It's really good at drawing out boils.