LOS ALAMOS, N.M. — Scientists at Los Alamos National Lab are leading the charge to find orphaned oil and gas wells in the U.S., including in New Mexico.

Hari Viswanathan, an environmental scientist at LANL, says these orphaned wells date as far back as the late-1800s.

“An orphaned well happens when a company actually has gone bankrupt and they’re no longer around to plug an abandoned well. That well becomes an orphan. And the government is then on the hook for plugging and abandoning that well,” Viswanathan said.

Viswanathan added there are around 350,000-1,000,000 orphaned wells in the U.S.

There is an urgency to find them too. Scientists say these wells can leak contaminants into our drinking water or methane that heats the earth.

“Methane traps a lot of heat, actually more than CO2, so there’s worries from a climate impact perspective,” Viswanathan said.

Since some of these wells date back over 130 years, they can be very hard to find. That’s why LANL scientists, like Viswanathan, are working with other national labs to fly drones over these sites. The drones have sensors on them to sniff out where these wells may be.

“You can imagine it has a metal detector, which is what a magnetometer is, and it’s looking for the metal that could be a well,” Viswanathan said.

Once scientists gather that data, they use artificial intelligence.

“AI is a very good tool for finding undocumented orphan wells, because AI is extremely good at picking out a signal from noisy data sets,” Viswanathan said.

They’ve been at this for about two years. Going forward, they hope to work with more local governments across the U.S., like they’ve worked with the Navajo Nation.

The more areas they expand to, the more effective their efforts are.

“We have a matrix of this is a city, this is a desert, this is a forest and we need to figure out how to find these in all these challenging different environments. So we’re coming up with these best practices,” Viswanathan said.