ALPENA - A gas well drilled in 1959 about 120 feet from the shore of Glady Fork, a popular trout stream in the Monongahela National Forest, ended up inside the stream channel after the devastating 1985 flood re-arranged the alignment of the Randolph County river.
The 7,000-foot-deep well, drilled by the Holly Oil and Gas Corporation of New York City on a federal lease in the forest, was deemed to be a dry hole and was plugged, capped and abandoned by 1962, after federal regulators signed off on the work.
But 23 years later, after the stream channel changed course following epic flooding in the state's eastern highlands, the well head pipe could be seen looming above the surface of the stream during normal flows.
Later, anglers and well inspectors began noticing air bubbles, an oily surface sheen and occasional globs of oil entering Glady Fork from the vicinity of the pipe.
The federal Bureau of Land Management suspected that a potentially failing well plug was causing the seepage, posing possible risks to water quality and the health of aquatic life in the stream, not to mention campers in the nearby Lower Glady Dispersed Camping Area.
The BLM, which oversees federal mineral and oil and gas leases on federally owned lands, offered to share funds with the U.S. Forest Service to plug the Glady Fork well and another gas well with similar issues near Seneca Creek, also in the Monongahela.
In 2006, plugging work got underway at the Seneca Creek well, but a large assortment of trash, including rocks, metal debris and tools dumped into the well, soon ate up all the funding budgeted to complete cleaning up and permanently sealing both wells, then estimated to cost about $100,000 each.
Funding to plug the Glady Fork well was sought by the U.S. Forest Service in 2009, but it did not come through until this year, with the BLM, the Forest Service and the state Department of Environmental Protection contributing to the effort.
"We waited 10 years to get the money to get this started, but it's finally happening now," said Will Wilson, forest geologist for the Monongahela, as he watched a crew from Buckhannon's Hydrocarbon Well Service prepare to ram through a metal plate blocking the casing of the old gas well about 20 feet below the surface.
"We had no idea there would be a metal plate in there," Wilson said. "It's a mystery and a surprise. There was no mention of it in the drilling logs for the well."
"There are tons of these old wells across the region," said Trey Mitchell, a petroleum engineer with the BLM. "Some of the people who drilled them back in the 1950s were more complete and accurate than others in keeping their logs. Here, the big picture for us here is to take care of the safety issue, since we don't really know what's down in that casing."
After penetrating the metal obstacle with a special bit, the Hydrocarbon Well Service crew planned to drill out the old well casing to a depth of about 2,300 feet, and then pump the void full of cement.
To reach the river island where the Buckhannon-based drill rig was operating, a crew from McKenna Construction built a causeway of limestone rocks extending from a parking area for the campground across an arm of Glady Fork.
At the drilling site, berms were built to contain any liquids emerging from the casing that aren't being pumped into a large storage tank. To protect the limestone causeway from fluid spills from the truck that pulls the drill rig, a child-size plastic wading pool was placed under its engine block and radiator. In the stream, floating booms were placed at strategic locations to capture and hold any pollutants or sediments.
"When the work here is complete, all the limestone rocks and gravel will be taken down, and the drill pad will be seeded" to naturally occurring grasses, Mitchell said. "The well will be plugged and remain beneath the surface of the river. You'll just see stream banks looking like they did before all this work began."
While about 60 active gas wells can be found on the Monongahela, the Glady Fork and Seneca Creek wells are the only orphan wells remaining in the national forest.
Reach Rick Steelhammer at
rsteelhammer@wvgazettemail.com,
304-348-5169 or follow
@rsteelhammer on Twitter.