Hello, everyone! Here in Albuquerque, we’re hanging on to the last days of summer. It still gets up to the 90s in the afternoon and I’m dreaming of cooler weather every night. Every day it seems like my weather app has a notification saying, “Record Broken” or “Hottest Day on Record”. Over the years, I’m getting more sensitive to our collective growing climate anxiety, and I feel a lot more people are. Every summer is getting longer and hotter, the winters are getting shorter and colder, and every natural disaster is getting more intense. That is a broad generalization, but the sense of gloom and futility is growing. It can be hard as a young adult to think that I can as one regular person that I can make a difference in the world in the fight against climate change and degradation of our natural world. So, I do feel proud that as a Civilian Climate Corps Fellow I can be a part of an organization like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that works to conserve our public natural resources.
I’m still working with the National Wildlife Refuge System to locate orphaned oil and gas wells. Orphan wells have been abandoned by their operating company or have run dry and since they are on public FWS land, it is the responsibility of the agency to plug these wells if possible. Plugging and remediating orphan wells prevents methane and other pollutants leaking into the air and water. However, the locations of orphan wells can be lost or inaccurate.
Since it’s impossible for me to visit every refuge in the Southwest region and beyond I create curated lists of possible orphaned well locations using remote sensed and historical well data. Remote sensed data is taken from a satellite or plane and can involve large areas and datasets. I use remotely sensed terrain data or lidar (light detection and ranging). With this lidar, I process it in geospatial software like ArcGIS into elevation models that show me the detail of the refuge’s bare earth terrain. With these models, I can mark areas of past well development. These can include old roads to well platforms, berms (raised areas around the well itself to prevent flooding), and old storage tanks.
However not all regions, states, or counties have lidar data that has been collected on them. Or the last lidar dataset available is too old for use for my methods. An alternative method my supervisor and I have developed is to look at historical aerial imagery. Many wells, especially in the Southern states like Texas and Louisiana, were drilled in the mid-late 20th century and appear in historical imagery as early as the late 1940s depending on the area. With high-detail and high-resolution aerial imagery I can create a model stitching photos together to create an image of a refuge from the past. With the highly detailed I can also see areas of past well development often clearings in forested/vegetated areas and often see the old wells themselves. It has been an interesting process so far and I’m excited to continue developing more techniques to locate orphan wells.
