Article series
America's Abandoned and Orphaned Well Problem
Eighteen articles, December 2025 to June 2026, from a single well in West Texas that came back to life to the pressure now moving through a century of Permian wellbores.
Read the seriesAn independent analysis practice
Subsurface risk from legacy oil and gas wells
Subsurface Risk Analytics is an independent analysis practice. It answers a narrow set of questions about legacy oil and gas wells: whether a wellbore can still hold what's being asked of it, whether injection pressure is reaching it, whether nearby seismicity fits the injection, and whether the financial assurance behind plugging actually covers the liability. The work is done by one geophysicist with 35 years in oil and gas subsurface work, and it's built to be checked.
Environmental and energy counsel
Landowners and pore space owners
Regulators
Consulting firms
The practice
Plain answers from old records
Most of the wells involved were drilled decades ago, plugged to the standards of their day or not plugged at all, and now sit inside disposal permit areas, injection zones, and subsiding ground that nobody planned for when they were abandoned. The practice reads old well records, injection data, and pressure histories and says plainly what they do and don't show.
Deliverables are technical memoranda and analysis you can audit, with the assumptions declared and the calculations left live in the workbook. Consulting expert support to counsel is available on matters involving legacy wells, produced water disposal, pore space, and induced seismicity.
01
Legacy wellbore integrity screening
Including pre-digital-record wells with incomplete casing, cement, and depth records.
02
Injection pressure and Area of Review
Pressure propagation beyond the regulatory review radius, using radial flow and pressure diffusion methods.
03
Induced seismicity assessment
Seismic catalog compilation and comparison against state mitigation protocols.
04
Disposal permit application review
Operator representations about faulting and aquifer separation, tested against regional geology.
05
Rate transient and pressure record review
Reproducing a model from its underlying data to test whether it holds.
06
Statistical testing of cause and effect
Whether a change in production or water cut lines up with its alleged cause, using changepoint, placebo, and bootstrap methods.
07
Financial assurance and bonding gap analysis
Bond coverage measured against actual plugging cost.
08
Technical memoranda and auditable analysis
For counsel, regulators, and landowners, in a form the other side can check.
Research
The work started with the writing
The research began in November 2025 as a personal project. The first article published that December, and the series reached eighteen articles by June 2026, covering failure mechanisms, financial assurance, well transfers, bankruptcy, litigation, and the effect of produced water injection on old wellbores. It found readers among operators, regulators, landowners, and environmental attorneys. Subsurface Risk Analytics was formed in January 2026 to carry it.
2.2 to 3.9M
unplugged abandoned wells nationally
EPA141,959
documented orphan wells, state reported
IOGCC, 2023$280B
estimated national cleanup liability
Carbon Tracker, 202014M
Americans within one mile of a documented orphan well
EDF, 2023ABA SEER, April 2026
Designed to Fail: How Financial Assurance Frameworks Created America's Orphaned Well Crisis
Presented to the American Bar Association's Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources at its 55th Spring Conference on Environmental Law in Minneapolis.
About the presentationScheduled
New York's legacy wells and the national orphaned well crisis
"From Fredonia to the Forgotten: New York's Legacy Wells and the National Orphaned Well Crisis," scheduled for NYSCPG Geology Days 2026 in Saratoga Springs, November 11 to 13.
What's comingIndependence
The research and writing are independent work under Subsurface Risk Analytics. I don't endorse candidates, policy proposals, or commercial products, and the analysis reads the same whichever side is reading it.
Contact
Start with the question
A first conversation is usually a short call about the question, the records available, and whether a geophysicist is the right person to answer it. Conflicts are checked before anything else is discussed.