Two More Leaky Oil Wells Plugged at Summerland Beach
State Lands Commission Has Now ‘Re-abandoned’ Eight Legacy Wells in Santa Barbara County
Two ancient, leaky oil wells at Summerland Beach were re-sealed last week. The oozing oil spouts, labeled Well A and Well B, join a list of now eight wells re-abandoned (or plugged) in Santa Barbara County by the California State Lands Commission and its consultant, 2H Offshore.
The wells — kind of like holes poked into the shoreline to access oil — are remnants of long ago operations. State Lands’s chief of external affairs Sheri Pemberton called them “vestiges” with no owners and no records of former operators that could be held responsible for the cleanup.
Starting on February 23 and finishing on February 28, workers sealed off the wells using metal casings and concrete, effectively entombing them.
Left behind from oil and gas operations of the late 1800s and early 1900s, there are roughly 200 of these high-priority legacy oil and gas wells that could leak oil into the marine environment along the California coastline, primarily at Summerland Beach, according to the commission. (Not to be confused with the 23 oil platforms — like Platform Holly — being decommissioned offshore.)
“There was all this oil and gas development in this area, predating the commission itself,” Pemberton said. “When all those operations ended, the way that the operators handled the wells was far inferior to the standards today.”
Old-timers often plugged and abandoned their wells with crude materials that had no hope of keeping them sealed in the long term. Since the commission owns the land from the mean high tide to three miles out, some of those legacy wells fall under their jurisdiction, making it their responsibility to re-abandon them (the right way).
Funding comes from the 2017 Senate Bill 44 (Hannah-Beth Jackson) Legacy Well Re-Abandonment program, which annually allocates $2 million to cap leaking oil wells along the California coast. The work began in 2018 with the successful re-abandonment of an especially leaky wellhead called Becker #1 at Summerland Beach. The most recent two wells cost an estimated $1,150,000 to re-seal.
“We want to do as many as possible,” Pemberton said, adding that the public has long held concerns about the oil bubbling up on Summerland Beach. “We just are limited because we only have so much funding. With the funding that we have, we try to plug as many as we can.”
Before this week, the most recent targets were re-sealed in 2023. The same year also marked the beginning of a study to map Summerland’s abandoned wellheads by Santa Barbara–based nonprofit Heal the Ocean (HTO) and their partner Bubbleology Research International.
According to HTO’s executive director Hillary Hauser, the study is on schedule and is expected to be finished by the end of 2026.
You must be logged in to post a comment.