sounds specialist accused of 5 and to tax on top of the whole world news at the top of the hour. next on the dw, a documentary looking at the oil industry is lasting on t legacy. good. the name is the calls back said wow, thank you so much for joining in. welcome to don't hold bad. a lot of people do that. it's all about saying it aloud. next, would it be nosy bay? like good. everyone to king. check out the award winning called com. so how back the the

family town on the great scores say it's close to everything. my family is all out there in the area and we, we were happen. the most painful things to watch kids stuff. so i had to really dive in there and try to figure out the cause of this mystery together. the return now to the latest and once being called the nation's biggest environmental disaster seems to be wells today is day

$84.00 of a runaway natural gas leak. above los angeles, that it may take more than a 150000000 pounds of leasing the we have a history of multiple legacies. oil and gas might be the largest, 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 on notice 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 something happens. and so it's like a ticking time bomb. it gets grow bigger and bigger and bigger overtime. and then, you know, we don't know when that bomb is going to grow and 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 and way to, to day there isn't a single one that still working on production stopped in the 1960 and only then this was on the french called 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 worked for the b r g handled 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 nit form. we're 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. that's true because that's cheap over here. to try to

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 onto the system, as well as almost 100 years old. 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 farm land. so the challenge here is to try to stop oil from leaking out onto the surface to the, to if it could be taught pre so sickly. 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 a band in sites like these worldwide. and 3000000 of them are in the

us alone. they're barely 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 top. if nothing was known about how much nothing could be admitted from an abandoned well. so i also enjoy, i know you 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 and the undergrowth. it's estimated

more than $800000.00 a band and wells are hidden in the forest 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, that's right 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 can 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, an 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 as of the week of the thing, i wouldn't guess this one is a super emitter, which is 1st basically means it's emitting at a much higher rate than a typical well, let's measure now. oh wow. that one's really high. c the. c

c highest low measured between $4.00 and $8.00 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 phantom entry 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 with start, the pump would start working the i am a reporter and editor at the bradford here 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 a band or orphan. well, the but in the time that i am forced to, to pay for $3.00 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 in thinking is

this going to 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. and 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 injuries. the fire chief of the bradford township volunteer fire department, the there was a couple of slides as well as 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 one 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 very jo voles 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. good news . 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 slow house 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 60 to re lease the lease. was an oil field until the early 19. so my so count, gas and 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 1971973. 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 kill was attempted. second attempt was undertaken on november

3rd. now what appeared to be a conventional well to the well continue the january 21, 2016. i 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 feeling 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, i would find bunches 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 and m d medical doctor people started complaining of all kinds of fun. usual symptoms on the urgent care side the so they walk in and complain 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 that goes through the respiratory rate, and then it translated to the rest of the body. everything gets exposed these people have been exposed 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 bins, the research and he made the statement in an email that this looks like chronic vinzini. the they kept saying, well it's just methane. 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 going off with justin out of court settlement. the victims, on average, received around 30000 euro is 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 have 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 blood. several 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 p as i 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 to you. but so it's a chevron well, but it hasn't produced in i don't know, 5 years, 10 years like look there's grass growing around it. so it hasn't produced. it's basically a band in, but they haven't plucked this this pressure that's really seems like something has gone wrong to kill somebody. it could be like if the be like shooting water and oil up in the air for 2021. when it, the brackish water is thing, salt, water and re eggs and 50 people expend. we all

facility to get this well packed up into the ground water from the deep under ground fully now their chemical compounds tube and poisoning the lot. moved to another ranch to avoid contamination and poisoning. the livestock had to be moved to another ranch. it took the company weeks to get the leak sealed the i think it's finally time to realize. yeah, things go wrong with older man and wells. and if it's actually a 100 percent, the wells are gonna need to be redone. well then you start talking near tens of

billions, hundreds of billions of dollars in liabilities that no one's considering right now . so yeah, i think, i think they are scared. i think if you start thinking that every well you drill, you're gonna have to plug not one time, but 5 times 10 times over its life. yeah, that's 1st add up to a lot of money. the bubbling brackish springs and a barren landscape. those weren't there 70 years ago. the, it's a dead zone. there's never going to be anything that grows there. again. i mean it will be dead forever. now i am the general manager of the middle. take this ground water conservation districts. there's a big lake of heavenly blue in the middle of the dry plains of texas,

but it's an environmental disaster rather than a resort. the water is very salty around it, or methane, and hydrogen sulfide h 2 s for swamp gas. a deadly gas often found at oil and gas drilling sites. this is the psalm layer, number one on this is the beam or like, well, you can see it up here about a 150 yards. a slow and it's phone about 600 gallons a minute. time h 2 as i am up land and the winds my backs we, i feel pretty safe about this distance from here. i don't want to get any closer than this because those the a 2 s levels that we've seen on this well or hardly will be very then if you're there and the breathing space longer in a few minutes you can test out the

ty edwards has been fighting for more than a decade against the oil industry, regulatory agency in texas, the railroad commission. it is refusing to see old a well saying water is coming out rather than oil. so it's not the re meant when it comes to a band and oil wells, it always boils down to one thing. it's expensive. the rarer commission goes and plugs a well on the less average cost is 5000 dollars, 6000 dollars and they can go plug 3 or $4000.00 wells and $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 leap, hosing the threat of another enormous toxic spill. in this region, more and more abandoned drilling sides are crumbling. the locals have even given them a nickname. they call them song, the wells in january 2022. a huge guys are appeared in this part of texas here to salt. water is gushing out from 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 tourist explorer, so they can be have here because no one is watching them and my feeling is that they really want to hide something the they scream 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 had of the ocean department with them going because germany and booking since

94 for reviews. in the morning we launched the so called side scan sonar. besides, guns owner looks a little bit like a fish and is flying over the sea floor and our expert to ja 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 esperanza is scanning the british exploitation sector, including for old rick sides of the british company, 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. we screen peace in germany, the was doing this maybe search to blow out in 1990. and i'll blow out some, some things here in the u. k. sector. at the height of either di, what i phones to age is that they stop the observation of 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 they have the feeling that the amount of gus is so small that they can stop the observation

the i made 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 potent greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. 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, 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 monitor and mobil nor see was directly involved in the drilling to this stage. they have lots done anything about this leak. and also the british government that's got handled over a let's say the area or the license for drilling there. it hasn't done anything about it. ready the

the in the north sea, most of these wells are, are abandoned over dry wells. working into the juma center for ocean research and 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 a 3 well as to 25, the 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 deflect 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 drugs for one of these shuttle gas pockets. and

here at this with his red bluff, for example, we see that these 2 wells, these black lines which would for this gas accumulation so that the main conclusion from, from our estimates of the methane emissions from the band in west and to the north sea is that this is the dominant input of methane. we have a 20 to maybe $32.00 tons per year of methane getting into the know, seen some of this, 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 dairy 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 sort of pulling together pieces of information from lots of sources because of the industry has been very good at you know, delaying or dodging this responsibility for the since the 1950s. oil and gas companies have been required by law to seal a band and 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 is 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 are wells that haven't been used for a production in at least 2 years. so production of oil and gas, this is from the states idol, well list. so if we wanted to, can just me like just for fun, we could just take a look and not and sort them. so here's one, it's been an idol for 118 years. 65 years, 62 years 45 years. like some of them are, i mean, i've been an idol for longer than i've been alive. one of the reasons that i'm

interested in either 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 multi national, 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, it 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, 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 leak below? and when will this? well, the seal 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 its inventory and is producing less and less oil. so over time, you know, what i expect to see happen is, has 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 cleanup. the more and more housing developments are being built. these to bakersfield promotional video says it's a great place, ideal 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 sunrise petroleum. and if you listen to me or listen, i can hear something you can smell a little something. nothing's odorless but i can smell something. but 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

. all right. so i'm actually feeling a little bit sick from that. i think i don't know what's going on. the, the, the, hey audrey, this is clark. after our visit, i pulled some local environmental groups and the state set up some inspectors to check the state felons. 21 idol wells. mfc 9 at concentrations are really high, high enough to be potentially explosive. so the good news is that the states has started unplug some of the wells, but the bad news, i guess, is that the problem is all a lot more widespread. and that's just that one legion. well that we found the

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unreasonable stuff. and i want my son to become a doctor to indicate it's time to, to us. and then when generations class this week on d. w, the, this is dw news, and these are our top step. this is dw news, and these are our top stories. a us president joe biden has issued an executive order, imposing sanctions on his release, hapless in the occupied westbank after a wave of violence. the measures include financial and travel restrictions and full settlers accused of violent attacks on palestinians is really prime minister's office, has criticized the sanctions as

a necessary and describes the vast majority of settlers as law abiding. the us has approved plans to strike targets in iraq and syria in retaliation for drone attack. and.