The Auditor General of Ontario released her annual report on Wednesday and it's not very flattering to the provincial ministry responsible for monitoring gas wells, which is a huge issue in Wheatley.
Auditor Bonnie Lysyk has concluded few oil and gas wells are being inspected each year by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry.
The Ministry is being asked to identify high-risk wells, including previously plugged wells, establish an up-to-date registry of high-risk wells, immediately plug leaking wells, and plug other wells in a timely manner in order of their risk rating, or take other safety measures.
Lysyk also reported the Ministry has not assessed the risk of all 27,000 oil and gas wells in the province and is therefore unable to determine whether it is focusing its proactive inspection efforts on the highest risk wells.
"Furthermore, based on our analysis of inspection data in the Ministry’s database for oil and gas wells, we found that only 19 per cent of oil and gas wells in the province have been inspected since 2005. Of those, 38 per cent of inspections occurred more than a decade ago," the 2022 annual report stated.
Lysyk wants the Ministry to establish an inspection policy and inspect more wells to eliminate known high-risk hazards, such as leaking wells.
The Ministry said it only has five inspectors, but plans to conduct 400 inspections a year, including active and inactive commercial wells, and abandoned wells.
The Ministry promised to assess the risk of documented gas wells across the province and will use funding through the Abandoned Works Program to plug eligible high-risk wells. The Ministry said it has spent about $23 million to plug about 380 wells since the beginning of the program in 2005.
The Auditor General also noted that unreliable information on how many high-risk wells have been plugged, wells that are poorly maintained, and improperly plugged can lead to contaminants getting into groundwater or rising to the land surface around the well.
The annual report stated that six per cent or 1,625 wells are not in use and have not been plugged and a further 30 per cent or 8,011 were plugged prior to 1970 when materials used to plug them included logs, gravel, and lead, which can lose their integrity over time.
Lysyk said as a result, at least 36 per cent of wells could pose a danger. She noted her team found that three high-risk wells have been leaking since at least 2018, but only one is scheduled to be plugged during 2022/23.
The Auditor General said her team was told during the analysis the Hydrogen Sulfide gas explosion that took place in Wheatley in August 2021 was in part due to a well that had been plugged in the 1960s and the materials used to plug the well had deteriorated over time.
The Ministry said it has documented information on about 27,000 oil and gas wells and as of May 2022, more 3,400 oil and gas wells were active in Ontario, while over 15,300 wells were considered abandoned.
The Ministry also reported it lacked information on an additional 7,300 wells while the remaining 1,000 were wells in various states of inactivity.
In November, a lawsuit was filed against the Municipality of Chatham-Kent and an external service provider that the municipality hired to monitor for gas. The Statement of Claim alleged that the parties “failed to trace the source of the gas leak and cap or remediate the source of the gas”, but the Ministry was not named in the lawsuit.