10s of 1,000s Of Decaying Oil & Gas Wells Dot Ontario, Many Unrecorded, Most w/o Funding For Capping/Remediation

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Southern Ontario was the early epicentre of what became Canada’s national petroleum industry, with commercial drilling for oil and natural gas beginning in the late 1800s. A geospatial Ontario map shows the sites of oil and gas wells across the southwestern part of the province — from quiet rural areas to the bottom of Lake Erie and even in busy urban centres like downtown Toronto. According to a report by the journal Geoscience Canada, 10,000 wells are estimated to have been operating in Ontario by the early 1900s — but records only exist for 1,500. By 1970, 50,000 wells had been drilled, but the province only has records for 27,000. Given these statistics, the Geoscience report authors concluded “there may be tens of thousands of unrecorded or lost wells in southwestern Ontario.”

Capping wells is expensive, and Ontario doesn’t have the funds to do so. Some of Ontario’s old wells were properly plugged once they became inactive, but others were dug before proper plugging standards existed. The inadequate materials used to fill and cap them degrade over time and can allow fluids to surface and leak. The cost to fix this problem is significant.

Landowners and municipalities shoulder the financial responsibility of properly capping orphan wells, which are inactive wells that have no known operator. It’s an enormous bill. The Ministry of Natural Resources maintains an abandoned works program to financially support well-capping, and the program has spent $29.5 million to date to cap 415 wells — at an average cost of $71,084 per well.

In June 2023, an additional $7.5 million was allocated to support municipalities over three years in risk and emergency preparedness related to old wells. The funds are part of a wider $23.6-million provincial strategy to identify and plug old oil and gas wells. But at an average cost of $71,000 to plug one well, it would cost more than $700 million to plug 10,000 sites, and that’s just a portion of the known wells in the province.

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https://thenarwhal.ca/ontario-old-oil-gas-wells-explainer/