Of the approximately three million orphan oil and gas wells in the United States, an estimated two million are unplugged, often leaking oil and brine and emitting methane gas due to inadequate decommissioning. Methane harms air quality and worsens climate change. Methane emissions can warm the planet more than 80 times as much as carbon dioxide over a 20-year period according to the Environmental Protection Agency, whose experts have equated the impact from orphan wells to annual emissions from more than 1.5 million cars.

Louisiana contains nearly 4,300 orphan oil and gas wells. The Louisiana Department of Natural Resources Office of Conservation estimates ‘plugging’ existing orphan wells will take 20 years at a cost of $128 million. Though oil and gas developers are encouraged to sequester funds to remediate disused wells, few regulations incentivize compliance. Louisiana state government has funding to plug only about 95 wells annually, and each year an average of 170 new orphan wells are added to the state list. The issue is acutely felt elsewhere in the United States: in Pennsylvania, for example, there are nearly 10,000 documented orphaned wells, but the state estimates there may be another 290,000, according to a report by the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission.

This collection of images explores issues concerning orphan wells in and around Oil City, a resource-rich region in Caddo Parish, in northwestern Louisiana. The series looks at the ways these orphan wells interface against the verdant, rural landscape of small communities and natural areas in and around Oil City. The area contains large swaths of pine forests and Caddo Lake, a 25,400-acre water body and bayou on the border between Texas and Louisiana. These photographs explore the range of wells abandoned within Caddo Parish: some display a characteristic pumpjack beneath tangled vegetation while others contain only a small wellhead visible in a backyard or downtown green.

Taken together, the series closely examines the pressing national issue of orphan wells through the lens of impacts within a region reeling economically and socially from the pandemic and the decline of its most profitable industry. The series asks the audience to consider the environmental, social, and aesthetic ‘slow burn’ resulting from disused oil and gas infrastructure, and what prolonged consequences result from continued neglect.