Abandoned Drill Holes After The Corona

Abandoned Drill Holes After The Corona

The US state of Texas has the most bankruptcies in the oil and gas industry. Texas is the largest producer of fossil fuels in the United States. At the beginning of the year, the companies were on the hunt for new production records, says Carl Ingham from the Association of Energy Producers in Texas. "Oil production was at record levels worldwide, in the United States and Texas, and then demand collapsed overnight. That's the recipe for a price crash. And that's what happened." More than a million jobs could be lost in the US oil and gas industry as a result of the pandemic. Less fuel is simply being sold, because the Americans are also staying more at home because of Corona. There is less traffic in the air and on the roads, and less is produced.

Danger from abandoned boreholes

Even before the crisis, the government in Washington estimated that more than three million wells in the US were no longer producing oil or gas. Almost two million of the abandoned boreholes are said to be unlocked. And that's how, for example, methane, a greenhouse gas, escapes, explains environmental scientist Bob Howard in a television interview. "Methane is the second most common greenhouse gas, after carbon dioxide, that drives global warming. It's almost as critical as carbon dioxide," says Howard. The amount of methane that escapes threatens to undermine success in climate protection. That was already a danger, for example, when extracting natural gas from shale through so-called fracking. In order to be able to produce from fracking sources at world market prices, new drilling has to be carried out again and again - like a hamster wheel at ever higher speeds, explains Ed Hirs from the University of Houston. Scientists from Colorado State University accused the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2018 that their assumptions about methane emissions from wells, tanks and pipelines in the oil and gas industry were underestimated. According to the scientists, they were already more than half higher back then.