with a clarity never seen before, scientists can now count millions of stars spread throughout these galaxies. they say the images provide crucial evidence of how stars and galaxies are formed. you're watching the news, stay with us. the my name is nose available, me the calls back said thank you so much for joining in. welcome to don't hold the bad. a lot of people do that. it's all about saying it aloud. next, would it be nosy bay like good everyone to kings. check out the award winning called called. so hold back the

family town a great school. say it's close to everything. my family is all out there in the area and we, we were happy with the most painful things to watch your kids stuff. so i had to really dive in there and try to figure out the puzzle of this mystery together. the return now to the latest and what's being called the nation's biggest environmental disaster seems to be. p. boyles. today is day $84.00 of a runaway natural gas leak above los angeles. that's it may take more than

a $150000000.00 pounds of leasing the we have a history of multiple legacy oil and gas might be the larger of the all over the world. we have an enormous number of the band and oil and gas wells. we have literally millions of them. the methane is a dangerous greenhouse gas. it seeps unnoticed, out of a band and oil wells. and as an environmental time bomb the this is very much a scandal for 13 years. i'm missing something leaking from the

wow. there's definitely, there's happened. and so it's like a ticking time bomb. it does grow bigger and bigger and bigger overtime. and then, you know, we don't know when that bond is going to go off the, the, the, let's see, we have some remnants here. the

to, to push up a little basic, historically had around 5000 oil wells in way to today. there isn't a single one that's still working on fiction. production stopped in the 1961 and this was on the french call. this part of the us us, our texas. many of the world's 1st refineries were located here. today, these relics are monitored by the french bureau of geological and mining research, the b r g m to tell you the i work for the b r g handled and as director of the eastern region of the department of mining safety. we are responsible for monitoring former mining sites on behalf of the state of tiffany nipple were currently monitoring 17 wells that are showing signs of oil leaks. and we need to ensure these links don't impact the local environment a most as true because of sheep over here in a trans it's

funny that we're dealing here with wells that have been plugged in. some of them have begun to leak again, due to the way the wellhead was closed on the system, as well as almost 100 years, always has to have dates back to the 19 twenties and it's around 400 meters deep phones. you don't want that. somebody produces both water and oil and it's right in the middle of farmland. so the challenge here is to try to stop the oil from leaking out onto the surface to the, to if it could be toward pacifically. i'll show 1st the, there are 12500 old wells in france, somewhere monitored others, not. those that receive little or no attention are called phantom wells. experts estimate there are as many as 30000000 abandon sites like these world wide and 3000000 of them are in the us alone. they're fairly monitored here either

the environmental engineer. i work for the department of energy is national energy technology laboratory. this is one of the most interesting projects that ever worked on unexplored topic. nothing was known about how much methane could be admitted from an advantage and well. so i also enjoy the new go out in the field and you're trying to find the wells. it's like a little bit of a scavenger hunt, the a drone carrying a device called a magnet thomas or is able to detect the metal in the undergrowth. it's estimated more than $800000.00 to bandon wells are hidden in the forests of pennsylvania. in

this park alone, a team found to $200.00 of them. virtually none of them were documented the route 2 thirds of the way there oh, well this is very obviously a well history there. that's one clearly it's not been now filled with anything. it's still got the intact, well had so this well was just at some point the operator decided it was no longer economically feasible to keep operating it and they could just walk away without changing it at all. really. so it's safe,

it's leaking. kind of focus a little better. so the infrared camera helps us. we get a nice picture and image that we can visually see the week very obvious week. wow, definitely you can see it looks like smoke coming out. so i mean, it could be out of being week of my thing i would guess this one is a super emitter, which is 1st basically means it's emitting and a much higher rate than a typical well, let's measure now. oh wow. that one's really high. the. c c highest low measured

between for an 8 leaders per minute. i think sometimes wells that might be closer to people's homes. if they're citizens that are the sun, complaints to the d. p, about wells on their property. those tend to get more attention. the elementary school that i went to, as a matter of fact, had a well in the front yard. really guess when we'd go out on the playground, sometimes the well would start, the pump would start working the i am a reporter and editor at the very end. for there it

is difficult to write about the industry because there's a very high number of people in this region who are employed in some fashion with the the so the people in the area don't talk as much about the environmental impacts of drilling or the environmental impacts of abandoned or, or from well the but in the time that i have words disappeared for the 3 separate houses and it's exploded in caught fire because of natural gas or methane. and knowing that there are so many, 397 in the city of bradford abandon or, or from wells i was very concerned and thinking is this gonna keep happening?

is this the house was behind my house. i bought a block away. it was breakfast time, it was about 715730 and i heard kind of a muffled noise. i ran out the kitchen door out into the yard and i could see the smoke coming out already from the, from the house burning the i was a professional fire investigator at the time that the samsung that occurred, the fire department started going off initially. i helped fight the fire before i started doing my investigation. the very upset,

very little medical injury. i'm fire chief of the bradford township. volunteer fire department. the there was a couple of slides allow, so it was actually blowed out into the yard. there's windows and glass and screens load out into the yard. the investigation went on for months. in chief burke house and i were at the house almost every day for 30 some days. we drilled holes in the foundation of the basement or in the summit floor. and we took the air st falls

every day to check to see if there was any gas still coming up out of there. the further we, we looked into it, the felt that had been some sort of outside source that got into the basement of the house. we continued to search for that, and it was later determined to bend from my band and wells a short short distance away from the property the after the accident in 2011 bradford residents trying to just get on with their daily lives. the when they didn't know was that methane from other abandoned wells was still sleeping into the or the until 2019, when another accident happened. just

a few kilometers away. the fly on buffalo. there's 2 ways that for that house exploded in the town of alleghany. it's possible, it was caused by methane gas seeping through the ground. it was ronald and betty jo vols were the couple and they lived on, i believe west branch road in alleghany. the people were not home at the time of the explosion. if the people had been home, they could have easily died. the house was blown completely to pieces. the many wells have been sealed in properly. the monitoring is all

too often rare. the well structures become dilapidated while oil companies are reluctant to pay repair and maintenance costs. the consequences of that have been fatal. it's a mountain so you don't know what's beyond that because you can't see i did not know they had a facility there. the after the flow out they, they found, i'm going to say 40 wells, maybe that needed to be sealed, or, or kept,

and cemented. and they found that they had $63.00 lead the lease was an oil field until nearly 19. so my so count, gas converted into a gas storage facility is 25 for someone of about 117 wells. it was originally thrilled in 1953 and served as an oil producer until 19171973. the oil well was converted to a gas storage. well, the road location suffered an axial venture. the leak was discovered on october 23rd 2015 at 3, 15 pm by noon, october 24th. the 1st case was attempted, 2nd attempt was undertaken on november 3rd. now it appears to be a conventional well to the well continue

the january 21, 2016 to smell the gas in the morning at drop off for lucas. i asked jessica and she also smelled in my headache. continue including fatigue and feeling disoriented. all day september 13, 2016. lucas woke up at 3 am with a stomach pain. she had diarrhea and had a headache and felt very nauseous. a lucas had a bad day in school. the kids were sitting brushes. like small, little like in the psych blisters them or i can't even describe it

later on a few months after we started noticing like my hair was fall off out. find a bunch of hair on my pillows. so it was bizarre. the deception manipulation and lies. so when you do find something that's bad, sweeping under the carpet and this is their whole pattern and practice my name, the medical doctor, people started complaining of all kinds of fun. usual symptoms on the urgent care side the so they walk in and complain of a headache and a nosebleed rash or nausea or vomiting diarrhea. and they had a combination of all the symptoms, which was very unlike people i've seen in the prior 25 years that i've done this.

so it was like, well, what is going on? so it kind of raised my eyebrows. the, the vector is a gas, it goes through the respiratory rate, and then it translated to the rest of the body. everything gets exposed. these people had been exposed on to an array of toxins. even today we don't know all of toxins because the department of public health and the board of supervisors failed to file a subpoena to get the list. this is a letter i received and other physicians received from the department of public health. and as you can see that they're requesting here,

it says avoid performing any talks of logical tests. these are not recommended or unlikely prove useful data for clinical evaluation of patients. and so what did you decide to do? just the opposite. the look at my busy research and he made the statement in an email that this looks like chronic busy and they kept saying, well it's just messing but it, you know, it wasn't just that. later on we found out crude oil was coming up branding down on us and they knew the many victims are better about the legal outcome of this environmental disaster. the

so cow gas company got off with justin out of court settlement. the victims on average, received around 30000 euros to compensate them for life changing injuries. in many cases, the residents fight against the oil industry was the meek against the mighty, the but one woman has sworn to bring big oil to its knees. rancher really want wants companies to be forced to face up to their responsibilities. the other rancher and i really enjoy hurting people who've done me wrong. and so chevron has screwed up my ranch. so now i'm not just finding where

else they screwed up on this ranch. i'm finding where they screwed up everywhere. my grandmother was out here. my mother was born out here. like this is my land. this is what's in my slide, chevrolet and made of best. and they should have to clean it up. the wells were drilled long before the ranch owner inherited the land. little by little for property has turned into a waste land. today, there are more than $130.00 abandoned wells scattered over the parcel. okay sarah. yeah, i'm at the 122. yeah, it's still got like 50 pci on the back side and then they've got a gauge on the long string. that's also it 50. it's against the rules, right?

okay, i'll take a picture. i'll send you right back. so it's perfect. so then the grass growing around it produced it's they haven't plugged, it should be 0 and pressure that's really means like something has gone wrong to kill somebody. it could be like, like if it'd be like shooting water and oil up in the air for by 2021. when it brackish water bring salt water and re eggs and 50 people weeks and weeks. all

facility to get this well packed up into the ground. water from a deep under ground filling their chemical compounds tube and poisoning the let's move to another ranch. it took the company weeks to get the leak sealed, like penalize, like all and with all the band and wells. and if it be done well, i think they are scared. i think you drill your time, but 5 it's life. yes. stat up to a lot of money, bubble. barren landscape. those are 70 years

ago. it's a dead zone. there's that grocer again. i mean, it will be dead forever not conservation districts there's a big of heavenly blue in the plains of texas, but it's rather than a resort the, the salty around and hydrogen sulfide age for swamp gas gas often found at oil gas drilling sites. this one is more like, well the yards f,

600 gallons a minute by an age to ass and the winds. my backs were distance from here in closer than this hour of relief. if you're there and the breathing space long, a few minutes you can pass out time in for more than a decade. again, agency in texas, the railroad commission. it is the old a well say rather than oil. so it's not the re met when a band and the oil wells, it all down to one thing. it's expensive. the rep on the

list app dollars. so for 1000 wells, far as the pays are $6000.00 and they can go plug 3 or $4000.00 wells at $5000.00 a piece average cost for beam, or like 203040 1000000 of the less than a kilometer from lake boehmer. one more well has started to leak hosing the threat of another enormous toxic spill. in this region, more than more abandoned drilling sides are crumbling. the locals have even given them a nickname. they call them on the wells. in january 2022,

a huge guys are appeared in this part of texas tier to salt. water is gushing out from the deep underground. these accidents keep happening and problems are piling up along with them. threatening an incident ecological disaster. the raw materials are also being exploited on the open seas. these drilling sites are aging to look around the fishing boats. the i know to mystics, boats they can be have here because no one is watching them. and my feeling is that they really want to hide something

the the screen piece ship has left the port of hamburg for an expedition of several weeks. the mission, to find old drill sites and identify potential leaks, the unit head of the ocean department. then grief is germany and working since 94 for reviews. in the morning we launched the so called side scan sonar. besides console, now it looks a little bit like a fish and is flying over the sea floor. and our experts here, jacob is trying now to find structures of the offshore industry on the sea floor. there are 15000 abandoned wells in the north sea. today,

the spit on site is scanning the british exploitation sector, including for old brick sides of the british companies, mobile north sea. the sector is one of 5. the others belong to denmark, germany, the netherlands, and norway, the i'm a marine biologist, and oceans container rescreen piece in germany. the was doing a small research to flow out in 1990. and i'll blow out a some famous something here in the u. k. sector. at the height of,

i bought it to you. what i floats to age is that they stop the observation more than 22 years now. so they just didn't care about it anymore. or you said at that time they have the feeling that it's loved any longer. dangerous as the feeling that in moses gus is so small that they can stop the observation the i'm in the

is really amazing. so we are at the empty center office missing leak that has been known for 30 years and has very obviously not stopped missing my st gas, which is a very important greenhouse gas in the the methane is bubbling up to the surface and being admitted into the atmosphere it's $28.00 times more harmful than another greenhouse gas c o 2. it's a big scandal. let's be honest. i mean, uh, it takes people decades. you know, 30 years we're talking now and no one is taking care and is taking the responsibility to close this leak and to monitoring mobile nor see was directly involved in the drilling to this stage. they have locks

done anything about this leak. and also the british government that's got handed over a let's say the area or the license for training there. it hasn't done anything about it. the the in the north seat, most of these welts are our vending or with dry wells. the working into the juma center for ocean research in kia deal was one of the largest marine institutes in europe. during all the expeditions we were able to dice down was a robot for etc. well,

it's to $25.00, even methane emissions. the we see here is a 3 d view of the top 1000 meters of the sea floor in the north sea. the, the black lines that you see, all the drill wells and the, the of colored blocks that you see all the met, the gas accumulations and these up a 1000 meters. and accidentally they drilled for one of these shuttle gas pockets. and here at this with his red bluff, for example, we see that these 2 wells, these collect lines which would for this gas accumulation. so the main conclusion from, from our estimates of the methane emissions from the bandwidth into the north sea, that is the dominant, the input of methane. we have a 20 to maybe 30 tons per year of methane getting into the know seen from the base

of the band. and well, it wasn't known because there's wasn't anything published so far. um, but when we talked afterwards to some of the oil and gas companies, then it became clear that they actually know quite well about that problem. maybe. yeah. in the us, clark williams. terry has been keeping a close eye on the oil industry strategy regarding old wells. my job title is energy finance analyst. what motivates me is like being a detective almost when you're pulling together. pieces of information from lots of sources because of the industry has been very good at, you know, delaying or dodging is responsibility for the

since the 1950s. oil and gas companies have been required by law to seal abandoned wells immediately. some companies have found a way around that they declare the wells inactive rather than abandoning them the . and i'm going to be looking around in bakersfield, where we are now just to the north of the city. there's a big oil producing area. and these purple dots are all the idol wells. so california itself has about $36000.00 idle wells. idle wells, our wells that haven't been used for a production,

and at least 2 years. so production of oil and gas, this is from the states idol, well list. so if we wanted to, we could just me like just for fun, we could just take a look and not and sort them. so here's one that's been idle for a 118 years. 65 years, 62 years, 45 years. like some of them are. i mean, i've been idle for longer than i've been alive. one of the reasons that i'm interested united wells is that the you know, that there's a, i a real risk that there's not going to be enough money left to clean them all up. what if this is deliberate? and what have certain companies intentionally saw to it that there wasn't enough money left to properly seal their wells. clark williams theory has begun to look into the dealings of a multinational called occidental petroleum. the company originally owned more than

8000 inactive bore holes in the region. but a few years ago the company split and it put all its bold wells under the ownership of another company. the california resources corporation, c r c, the. so this one as well is number 3. 0, one. in section 23. the operator is california resources corporation. so this will, he hasn't produced anything for the last 5 years, at least according to the, the records we have. so, you know, in theory, you know that all of these wells will have to be plugged sunday the a black ring on the ground surrounds the well. but how big is the link below?

and when will this well be sealed? the, i think the strategy of the industry has been to some extent, in some cases, to isolate these low producing wells in companies that don't have the resources to pay for clean up the really what the c r c operation is it's, it's essentially a declining resource it's has more and more idle wells in his inventory and is producing less and less oil. so over time, you know, what i expect to see happened is it will have more and more idle wells, fewer and fewer productive wells, bigger and bigger liability. and it may eventually not have the resources that it needs to pay for clean up. the more and more housing developments are being built. these to bakersfield promotional video says

it's a great place deal for families. but do potential buyers know those homes are next to an oil well graveyard and a dangerous one at that the the authorities in california have been demanding the old wells be sealed since 2017. up until that year, a company called sunray worked here the let's go take a look. this is lower. well 123 owned by sunray petroleum. and if you listen to me or listen, i can hear something or you can smell a little something. nothing's odorless but i can smell something,

but you hear that sound level hissing sound. it's been idle for years. there's been no activity on it. but there's something going on here. can see there's just some tape here. just some duct tape, the alright. that's what i'm actually feeling a little bit sick from that. i think i don't know what's going on. the hey, audrey, this is clark. after our visit, i told some local environmental groups and the state set up some inspectors to check the state felons $21.00 idol wells of religion. mfc.

9 at concentrations are really high, high enough to be potentially explosive. so the good news is that the stage has started plug some of the wells, but the bad news i guess is good. the problem is all a lot more widespread and then just that one we can well the, we found the

how here it's not just online retailer is coping with a short of skilled was hey, i guide almost all operations to processes and humans. all right, the home same thing. it's a fully automated operation. most of the time made in germany. in 30 minutes on d w. the thing was like a sticking point to, you know, find what you into that warranty wants to finish your studies. now you have a significant from the train, you can choose to go back to somewhere else. currently more people than ever on the worldwide in such a professional life categories. something that is coming very, very soon. and yeah, can we learn more about or know what

a story info my grands have someone else to the see the highlights of the selected for you. you every week? a new a box, subscribe. now. they cases an applicant, this vacations an applicant? do they have the web? i went, i told me that they don't have to do this and we go say colson tissue . today's because when they go to that we set up the lovely new meal with caldwell. i'm a tenant, although i so not because the the,

this is dw news and these are top stories. it is rarely prime minister. benjamin netanyahu is ruling out any military withdrawal from gaza or mass release of homeless prisoners. his comments come a bit of fresh push for seats fire and for freeing of hostages. i'm off says it's reviewing the new proposal, put forward by international mediators. following talks in paris, the white house has expressed hope that the 2 sides will prove the deal. israel's military says it has killed 3 militants belonging to a quote. terrace cell in the west bank is rarely commandos. disco.