38 Applied Geoscience Approaches for Legacy Oil and Gas Wells

This technical session will highlight the applied work to address the complex environmental challenges of legacy oil and gas exploration including  location, data management, monitoring, risk assessment, and remediation of orphaned and abandoned wells.

Tuesday, 24 March 2026
8:00 AM - 9:30 AM
CCC, Room 26

PRIMO – An Open-Source Oil & Gas Well Plugging Optimization Program

Paper number: 38-3
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 8:45 AM – 9:05 AM

Authors

Abstract

At the end of their productive lives, all oil and gas wells in the United States must be eventually decommissioned through a process known as plugging and abandonment (P&A). Often, public and private entities must down-select candidates from a broader population due to the high cost of P&A (often several tens of thousands of dollars per well) and limited budgets. In doing so, these entities often prioritize wells based on various risk factors (e.g., very old, leaking oil, etc.) and allocate resources to plug the most problematic wells.

Our previous work demonstrates that considering logistical factors and shared well characteristics can leverage economies of scale to enhance the efficiency of plugging campaigns. In 2024, the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory developed the PRIMO Optimization Tool, a decision-making tool that enables the identification of high-impact and high-efficiency plugging projects, thereby empowering decision-makers to down-select candidate wells for plugging campaigns in a way that balances P&A priorities and campaign efficiency [1].

This work presents PRIMO’s main capabilities and introduces the PRIMO web application, an intuitive user interface that leverages our sophisticated mathematical optimization model to rigorously optimize P&A priorities and plugging campaign efficiency. The web app simplifies user interaction, provides a powerful data management framework, and supports a broad user base (e.g., state agencies, well owners/operators, and plugging companies) to use PRIMO for decision-making. Specifically, we provide a demonstration of how to input the information on candidate wells, plugging campaign budget, and user-defined priority and efficiency criteria to PRIMO. A real-world case study that consists of 667 oil and gas wells and impact and efficiency priorities (e.g., well age, well proximity to schools/hospitals, well accessibility, distance between wells in projects) is presented to showcase PRIMO’s  core capabilities: (i) ranking a candidate well population based on priorities, (ii) recommending high-impact and high-efficiency P&A projects, and (iii) assigning impact and efficiency scores to projects allowing for rigorous quantitative comparison among them.

[1] Strahl, William, Li, Ruonan, Tumbalam Gooty, Radhakrishna, Lee, Sangbum, Kakkad, Dev, Jaffe, Tyler, Puranik, Yash, Zamarripa, Miguel A., and Drouven, Markus G. 2025. PRIMO – An Open-Source Oil & Gas Well Plugging Optimization Program. (Under Internal Review).

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 58, No. 2

doi: 10.1130/abs/2026NE-411410

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