Cleanup

New Mexico’s economy could get a significant boost if oil and gas producers were to promptly remediate the unplugged oil and gas wells on state trust and private lands, according to economic research firm O’Donnell Economics. A cleanup effort would pump $8.2 billion into the New Mexico economy and support 65,337 job years, or the…

The Alberta government launched a long-range campaign last week to make oil and gas companies pay for cleaning up a generations-old and growing backlog of 96,969 depleted and inactive wells. Energy Minister Sonya Savage announced a stiffened polluter-pay policy that requires producers to devise five-year cleanup plans and act on them under supervision by the…

Chevron Corp. has finished cleaning up the site of an abandoned well that leaked more than one million gallons of oil and water in California’s San Joaquin Valley.

Rapid natural gas development has created a growing backlog of depleted wells in need of safety and environmental cleanups in northern British Columbia (BC), according to provincial Auditor General Carol Bellringer.

Natural gas traffic stopped temporarily today on the Alliance Pipeline to Chicago from northern British Columbia and Alberta after a processing plant mistakenly let a poison impurity briefly flow into the export conduit (see related story).

BP plc won’t be able to collect from Halliburton Co. any of the cleanup costs and economic losses that resulted from the Macondo well blowout in 2010 in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico (GOM), a district judge in New Orleans has ruled. U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier, who is to oversee a Macondo trial beginning later this month, in January made a similar ruling for Transocean Ltd. BP filed a lawsuit last year to recover from Halliburton, Transocean Ltd. and Cameron International some of the estimated $40 billion in costs and losses that followed the well explosion (see NGI, April 25, 2011) The case is In re: Oil Spill by the Oil Rig “Deepwater Horizon” in the Gulf of Mexico, on April 20, 2010, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Louisiana, No. 10-md-02179. Halliburton was the well cementing contractor, Transocean owned the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and Cameron manufactured the blowout preventer for the Macondo well. Cameron and BP settled their lawsuit in December (see NGI, Dec. 19, 2011). On Feb. 27 the litigants are scheduled to meet in New Orleans where Barbier is to preside over the initial BP spill trial.

Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection Sec. John Hanger pointed to the cleanup problems the state continues to deal with concerning another abundant natural resource as a situation no one wants to face again. He believes drilling for natural gas in the huge Marcellus Shale reserve doesn’t occur without potential problems.