Renewable energy production potential of abandoned and orphaned oil and gas wells and sites
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Abandoned and orphaned oil and gas well sites may be repurposed for wind and solar energy, while the wells themselves can be redeveloped for geothermal energy production. We estimate the total number of abandoned and orphaned wells in Canada and the United States to be 3,485,480 of which 4% are orphaned and in need of government funding. When normalized by today’s oil production, the United States has twice the number of abandoned and orphaned wells compared to Canada. Across Canada and the United States, we find more than 15,000 gigawatt of wind capacity and 7 gigawatt of solar capacity at abandoned and orphaned well sites. More than 90% of abandoned and orphaned wells with available depth are better suited for shallow geothermal systems and heating applications, yet deep geothermal is possible at up to 10% of the wells. Repurposing oil and gas wells can help fulfill national energy transition goals and emission reduction targets, while providing an additional funding stream to manage their environmental risks.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".