Inside Energy (https://insideenergy.org/tag/abandoned-wells/)
For weeks this spring, students and teachers at the school in tiny Midwest, Wyoming reported strange smells and headaches. Then, in May, the school shut down after health officials detected dangerous levels of potentially toxic gases. But for months, no one could answer the questions: What were the gases? And how did they get into the school?
The search is continuing for the source of a gas leak that shut down the school in Midwest, Wyoming at the end of May. An Inside Energy analysis of the state oil and gas database shows there are more than 700 active and abandoned wells in a one mile radius around the Midwest school.
Colorado’s connection between people and drilling goes back much further than the recent frenzy of oil and gas development: Coloradans aren’t just living among new wells, they are also living among – and sometimes on top of – wells drilled and abandoned decades ago.
Explore Wyoming’s abandoned well locations on this interactive map.
In many parts of the West, areas that are now houses and schools and shopping centers were once oil and gas fields. There’s little in the way of a visible legacy, but hidden underground, there are hundreds of thousands of abandoned wells. An Inside Energy investigation has discovered that in many communities, new development is happening on top of those old wells.
Companies have drilled tens of thousands of new wells in the last few years; deeper wells, that will be more expensive to clean up when they run dry. How much more expensive?
