Damaged buildings across Erie Street from the explosion in Wheatley, Ont., July 22, 2022Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
The Ontario government says it will spend $23.6-million over the next three years to address the threats posed by thousands of abandoned and potentially leaky oil and gas wells that dot the province – wells like the one that caused a massive blast in Wheatley, Ont., two years ago.
Natural Resources Minister Graydon Smith said Friday that most of the cash will go toward developing a long-term strategy to identify and plug the most dangerous of these abandoned wells, which can be more than a century old. The government will also boost an existing program set up to cap problem wells, and it will provide grants for affected municipalities, which are mostly in Southwestern Ontario, to improve their emergency preparedness.
The announcement was made exactly two years after a gas leak was first discovered in the basement of a defunct pub in Wheatley, a small town on Lake Erie, southeast of Windsor. About three months later, in August, 2021, the leaking mix of methane and lethal hydrogen sulphide ignited, destroying two buildings, injuring 20 people and leaving the community’s centre an evacuated disaster zone.
A Globe and Mail investigation revealed that local officials in Chatham-Kent, the municipality that includes Wheatley, repeatedly pleaded in vain for more help from the province after gas was first detected. A Globe analysis also showed that, of 26,674 oil and gas wells on record across Ontario, 7,424 were potential “orphans,” meaning their operators, who are normally held responsible for their capping and safety, may have gone bankrupt or no longer exist.
Many of these wells, experts warn, date back to decades before modern standards went into effect and may have been improperly plugged. They pose a danger that successive Ontario governments have failed to address adequately.
On Friday, Mr. Smith made his announcement by a farmer’s field in Blenheim, Ont., at a site where his ministry had just funded the remediation of three at-risk wells. The town, about 100 kilometres east of Windsor, is about 50 kilometres away from Wheatley.
The new funding marks a major shift for the government, which spent much of the two years after the explosion pledging to create a new strategy but dedicating no new money.
While the minister said Friday that the government’s strategy could include “policy changes,” he would not commit to setting up a specialized provincial gas-leak response team, or altering Ontario’s legal regime for determining who is responsible for dealing with orphan wells. Currently, the province leaves that largely to property owners and local municipalities.
Mr. Smith said the announcement was a first step, and that drafting the plan would involve more consultations with municipalities, residents and experts.
Asked in an interview after the announcement why it had taken almost two years for Ontario to act, Mr. Smith said the government needed its consultants to complete their probe of the Wheatley disaster. That report was delivered in March.
“This is a difficult issue. It’s not just a case of let’s throw some resources at it and hope it all works out,” Mr. Smith said. “It has to be approached strategically.”
As part of Friday’s funding commitment, the minister pledged to double spending on Ontario’s Abandoned Works Program, which funds the capping of orphan wells. The new money would ramp up the initiative over the next three years to $6-million annually. It currently plugs about 20 wells a year. A 2004 internal government report had warned that Ontario should be plugging 40 to 50 each year.
Scott Grant, a representative with the Professional Engineers Government of Ontario, which represents government-employed engineers, said Friday’s move was too long in coming. PEGO has said its members have been raising red flags about orphan wells for years.
“You would hope that there would be a little more action at this stage, rather than just money for a plan,” Mr. Grant said. He argued the ministry needs to set up a new in-house team of engineers to manage the problem.
Ontario also announced that it will provide Chatham-Kent another $2.5-million, an amount that still falls short of the municipality’s added costs since the Wheatley crisis. Chatham-Kent Mayor Darrin Canniff thanked the province for its “commitment to reviewing and addressing” the difficulties municipalities like his are facing.
The provincial government says it has now spent $25-million on the Wheatley explosion, a bill that includes the investigation, as well as support payments for residents and businesses.
The Ontario Association of Fire Chiefs, which had urged Mr. Smith to take action last fall and warned that small fire departments were ill-equipped to deal with leaking wells, called the announcement “an important first step.”
Wheatley resident Howard Gabert, chair of the community’s Wheatley Task Force, said the announcement was welcome. But he argued the government should make the petroleum industry pay for the cleanup of old wells, as is done in Alberta and other Western provinces.
Ontario should “look at policy changes to stop downloading the responsibility of abandoned wells onto property owners,” he said.