Ciulla Fabio, Santos Andre, Jordan Preston, Kneafsey Timothy, Biraud Sebastien C, Varadharajan Charuleka
Earth and Environmental Sciences Area, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, United States.
Environ Sci Technol. 2024 Dec 17;58(50):22194-22203. doi: 10.1021/acs.est.4c04413. Epub 2024 Dec 4.
Undocumented Orphaned Wells (UOWs) are wells without an operator that have limited or no documentation with regulatory authorities. An estimated 310,000 to 800,000 UOWs exist in the United States (US), whose locations are largely unknown. These wells can potentially leak methane and other volatile organic compounds to the atmosphere, and contaminate groundwater. In this study, we developed a novel framework utilizing a state-of-the-art computer vision neural network model to identify the precise locations of potential UOWs. The U-Net model is trained to detect oil and gas well symbols in georeferenced historical topographic maps, and potential UOWs are identified as symbols that are further than 100 m from any documented well. A custom tool was developed to rapidly validate the potential UOW locations. We applied this framework to four counties in California and Oklahoma, leading to the discovery of 1301 potential UOWs across >40,000 km. We confirmed the presence of 29 UOWs from satellite images and 15 UOWs from magnetic surveys in the field with a spatial accuracy on the order of 10 m. This framework can be scaled to identify potential UOWs across the US since the historical maps are available for the entire nation.
无证废弃油井（UOWs）是指那些没有运营者且向监管部门提交的资料有限或没有资料的油井。据估计，美国存在31万至80万口无证废弃油井，其位置大多未知。这些油井可能会向大气中泄漏甲烷和其他挥发性有机化合物，并污染地下水。在本研究中，我们开发了一个新颖的框架，利用最先进的计算机视觉神经网络模型来确定潜在无证废弃油井的精确位置。U-Net模型经过训练，用于在地理参考历史地形图中检测油气井符号，潜在的无证废弃油井被识别为距离任何已记录油井超过100米的符号。开发了一个定制工具来快速验证潜在无证废弃油井的位置。我们将这个框架应用于加利福尼亚州和俄克拉何马州的四个县，在超过40000平方公里的区域内发现了1301口潜在的无证废弃油井。我们通过卫星图像确认了29口无证废弃油井的存在，并通过实地磁测确认了15口无证废弃油井的存在，空间精度约为10米。由于全国都有历史地图，这个框架可以扩展到识别全美国的潜在无证废弃油井。
