Agronomist Cody Hatzenbuhler walks across salt-damaged land in Bottineau County Aug. 11. Hatzenbuhler, whose company has been involved in reclamation, joined members of the Salted Lands Council on a tour in Bottineau County.

Oilfield reclamation has been an issue for many years in North Dakota.

The main source of reclamation funding has been an abandoned well, plugging and restoration fund created by the Legislature in 1983, initially to accept violation fines, well bonds or income from oil sold if the state took over a well.

“So for the first 30 years, there was a fund but it was always underfunded. It never had enough money to really get the job done,” said Helms.

The Bakken boom changed that.

“For the last nine years, there’s been a very good income stream and usually only very few orphaned wells, maybe a dozen or so a year at any point in time,” said Lynn Helms, director of the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources.

An orphan well is a well for which the operator has walked away or gone bankrupt or the bond is not sufficient to cover the plugging and clean up. Following a public hearing, the state can confiscate the well and use the bond to plug and reclaim it.

If a well is a risk to the environment or public health and safety, the state will close it. If profitable and not a hazard, either the operator continues to operate it and pay off the judgment or the state will transfer title to a new operator, which becomes responsible for the judgment.

Wells no longer producing in paying quantities typically don’t sell and the state must utilize its abandoned well fund to address them based on a prioritization that considers environmental and public risks as well as environmental justice, or impact on disadvantaged communities.

“When the pandemic hit in 2020, we all of a sudden went from typically 10 or 12 orphan wells, to almost 400 wells with the oil prices during the pandemic and the bankruptcies that occurred with operators,” Helms said. Almost all those wells were older, non-Bakken wells.

The Legislature provided $66 million from federal pandemic money to plug and reclaim those wells and employ unemployed oil workers. The state put about 3,800 people to work during that process and plugged most of the wells, Helms said.

However, 157 sites did not get reclaimed due to winter setting in and the state running out of money and time, Helms said.

When the federal infrastructure bill was working its way through Congress, North Dakota’s congressional delegation offered up a nationwide program modeled after North Dakota’s program during the pandemic. The nationwide program contained $4.7 billion, with an initial round of funding provided to 30 oil and gas producing states. North Dakota received its $25 million grant in September.

With the money, the state should be able to finish the plugging of the existing 92 orphan wells and the reclamation that has been started, Helms said.

About half the sites addressed with pandemic money didn’t show contamination and only required removal of equipment and scoria or gravel used as surfacing, Helms said. Where contamination was found, testing was done to see how deep it went.

“All of that contaminated dirt is going to be dug out and hauled to special waste landfills,” Helms said. “We have to buy topsoil and spread over the site, and either seed it back to prairie or let the farmer farm it for a year or two. But we don’t walk away from it until the vegetation has been restored. So that’s a long process if you find contamination. It takes at least three years, and it may take longer. We’ve had some of them take up to 10 years before we were satisfied that it was as productive as the land around it.”

Helms said reclamation includes breaking up compacted soil at a site and adding soil amendments such as leonardite or gypsum to improve the soil health to again grow plants.

“It’s been a learning process. It can’t be done in a hurry. Just because there’s topsoil on it and it’s been seeded doesn’t mean you can just walk,” Helms said. “Some of that topsoil is substandard, not the best stuff, and it needs a lot of amendments added to it and it needs work over the years, retilling it and tilling in manure or leonardite.”

The state worked with four consulting firms, which hired three well- plugging contractors and several reclamation contractors. Based on the experience with the reclamation contractors, the state identified the best firms for providing the most success.

One company, Terracon, in its research tested about a dozen processes for cleaning up salt contamination and developed a design for restoring soil productivity, Helms said. It involves excavating, constructing a manmade cattail slough, putting in drain tile and geocloth and adding amendments to the soil.

“It’s a lot of work and it’s expensive, but it looks like it can restore soil productivity in two or three years. So we’ll see how that plays out. I am certain we will learn more as we go,” Helms said.

Helms said the state will resume reclamation efforts next spring.

The federal infrastructure law extends for a decade, after which time North Dakota should have addressed its backlog of older wells, Helms said.

Landowner Daryl Peterson of Antler said Helms underestimates the cost and difficulty of the reclamation.

“If reality matched his projections, we would not have the ongoing tragic destruction of our land that you have seen. Reclamation has been going on for 12 years on my land, guided by state regulators, with limited success,” Peterson said.

He is concerned about practices that continue, including injecting saltwater into the production zone to force oil into old wells. The aging pipelines are at risk of fracturing from the pressure, and even newer lines aren’t a guarantee of no problems, he said.

“When you’re getting three, four barrels of oil out of these wells, and you’re pumping in 400-500 barrels of saltwater, it’s just too risky for the rewards that can come from it,” he said.

He noted, too, that lenders have become reluctant to grant mortgages or make loans against land with oil activity. He hasn’t been able to obtain loans against his salt-damaged land, he said.

Petro Harvester, which operated wells on Daryl Peterson’s land, attempted a seven-year reclamation effort but filed bankruptcy this summer in the middle of the project. The company contracted with the agronomy firm Pan Ag.

“They followed probably 40% of the three-year plan. We never got to hit our goals every year on our recommendations,” said Cody Hatzenbuhler, owner of Pan Ag, Mandan.

In sharp contrast to the way saltwater has been handled in legacy fields, the Salted Lands Council highlights the safety and technology being used by some operators in the Bakken today.

At Goodnight Midstream’s Nelson Saltwater Disposal Site near Keene, handling produced water from oil activity is serious business.

“I believe Midstream is doing it the right way,” said landowner Donny Nelson of Keene, whose family has lived in the hub of oil activity since the 1950s. “The facilities and the technology they’re using, I think, is probably the best right now.”

Produced water from a number of area oil well locations is pumped through a pipeline to the gathering facility on the Steve Nelson property, where a gravity-operated tank system removes solids, separates residual oil and stores remaining saltwater in a 126,000-gallon storage tank. The saltwater eventually is deposited 5,000 to 6,000 feet below ground in a porous formation beneath impervious upper formations.

In addition to following all government regulations regarding saltwater disposal, Goodnight Midstream has developed internal features to enhance safety, said Landon Kelly, operations foreman with the company.

“It’s just kind of been an evolution as we’ve grown and done things better and improved things,” he added. “We have all sorts of automation set up so if something’s not looking right, a pressure is wrong, or something out of the ordinary happens, it will set an alarm off and shut everything down.”

All Goodnight Midstream’s sites, whether served by trucks or pipelines, are fully lined and bermed. Should there be a spill, sites are designed to contain 24 hours worth of produced water.

Twice a month, Goodnight Midstream conducts an aerial inspection of its pipelines. A continual watch exists on pressures and flow rates in the pipelines to detect any discrepancies.

“We know exactly how much water is put in and how much water comes out. That’s constantly being compared to their real time graph. So if those two lines get off for some reason, then we’d go out and investigate,” Kelly said. “Hopefully, it’s just a metering issue, and almost all the time that’s what it is. But every time we take it seriously.”

Several cameras continually monitor the sites, feeding into both local hubs and a central control room in Texas. Every hour, the control room operator can compare images to detect any changes and send alerts if necessary.

Kelly said there have been alerts from that monitoring that required action.

“There’s been a couple that could have been really bad if we weren’t doing that,” he said. “Automation and the remote monitoring has been huge in this industry — and being able to catch things before stuff happens. We’re continually trying to develop new ways to make sure that nothing happens.”