Public data from three US states provide new insights into well integrity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Oil and gas wells with compromised integrity are a concern because they can potentially leak hydrocarbons or other fluids into groundwater and/or the atmosphere. Most states in the United States require some form of integrity testing, but few jurisdictions mandate widespread testing and open reporting on a scale informative for leakage risk assessment. In this study, we searched 33 US state oil and gas regulatory agency databases and identified records useful for evaluating well integrity in Colorado, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania. In total, we compiled 474,621 testing records from 105,031 wells across these states into a uniform dataset. We found that 14.1% of wells tested prior to 2018 in Pennsylvania exhibited sustained casing pressure (SCP) or casing vent flow (CVF)-two indicators of compromised well integrity. Data from different hydrocarbon-producing regions within Colorado and New Mexico revealed a wider range (0.3 to 26.5%) of SCP and/or CVF occurrence than previously reported, highlighting the need to better understand regional trends in well integrity. Directional wells were more likely to exhibit SCP and/or CVF than vertical wells in Colorado and Pennsylvania, and their installation corresponded with statewide increases in SCP and/or CVF occurrence in Colorado (2005 to 2009) and Pennsylvania (2007 to 2011). Testing the ground around wells for indicators of gas leakage is not a widespread practice in the states considered. However, 3.0% of Colorado wells tested and 0.1% of New Mexico wells tested exhibited a degree of SCP sufficient to potentially induce leakage outside the well.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".