The gas wells nobody remembers drilling

On an August afternoon in 2021, a building in downtown Wheatley, Ontario exploded. About twenty people were injured, two buildings were destroyed, and dozens of households and businesses were displaced for months. Reporting afterwards identified an abandoned gas well near the site, and Wheatley itself had a history of gas seeps going back decades. The town had been evacuated twice in the weeks before the blast because gas was detected downtown.

What made the story land across the province is that Wheatley is not unusual ground. Ontario is old oil and gas country, with commercial drilling reaching back to the 1850s and 1860s, before licensing, before record-keeping, before anyone imagined a subdivision over the field. The province’s records hold roughly 27,000 legacy oil and gas wells, and the Ontario Petroleum Institute has estimated that around 4,400 of them pose some level of risk. The province runs a program that plugs the worst orphaned wells; it has spent $29.5 million plugging 415 of them, which works out to about $71,000 a well and a very long queue.

What the records hold

Ontario keeps a public petroleum wells database. A record typically holds the well’s location, its type, its status, and what is known of its history: drilled, abandoned, plugged, and when, where that was ever written down. The wells cluster where the geology is, which means the southwest above all, along with pockets elsewhere in southern Ontario, including under land that is now farms, towns and cottage lots. Most recorded wells sit exactly where the record says, quietly plugged, and are nothing more than a line in a database. The record’s value is that it exists at all, because this is a category of question that is nearly impossible to answer for a specific address any other way.

The two honest limits

The first limit runs one way: a recorded well near a property is a fact worth knowing, and it is only a record. It does not say the well is leaking, failing or dangerous, and nothing in a database can. Condition is a question for the ground, answered by the ministry’s inspectors or a qualified consultant, not by a map.

The second limit runs the other way, and it is the one Wheatley taught: the oldest wells predate every requirement to report them. Thousands were drilled, produced, and were abandoned with whatever passed for plugging in 1890, and a share of them made it into no record at all. Locations in the old records can also be approximate. So the absence of a recorded well is the absence of a record, and nothing stronger. On this subject, more than most, silence is not safety.

The questions that settle it, and who answers them

Signs worth taking seriously on old ground in the southwest: a pipe of no obvious purpose, persistent bubbling in a wet spot, a sulphur smell that comes and goes. None of them proves anything, and each is a reason to make the call rather than to wonder. Owners with a suspected well are exactly who the provincial program is for.