About the OSR Project Tracker

The Louisiana Oilfield Site Restoration (OSR) Project Tracker is an interactive dashboard of orphan- and idle-well activity in Louisiana. It presents the current inventory of orphan wells alongside plugging activity across the state OSR program, including legacy state and operator plugging, the federally funded Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA, §40601) phase that began in FY2023, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service refuge campaign. The tracker follows plugging progress, methane-leak measurements, the social costs of methane emissions, the economic impacts of well plugging, and the coastal and offshore distribution of orphan wells.

This tracker was first established as part of the project “Estimating Future Oilfield Site Restoration Costs and Methane Emissions from Orphaned and Idle Wells in Louisiana”, funded by the Louisiana Department of Conservation and Energy (C&E, formerly the Department of Energy and Natural Resources) with funding originating from §40601 of the IIJA, and built as a collaboration between several academic departments and institutions. The tracker now continues beyond that project as an ongoing record of the state's orphan well inventory, plugging progress, and program impacts.

Departments Involved

• LSU Energy Institute, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge
• Oceanography & Coastal Sciences, LSU
• Environmental Sciences, LSU
• Petroleum Engineering, LSU
• Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, University of California, Davis

Data Sources

Methodology

Orphan-well inventory

A well is counted as an orphan when it appears on the Louisiana C&E orphan-well list with no viable responsible operator. Wells are retained on the roster until they reach a plugged-and-abandoned (P&A) status confirmed in SONRIS, at which point they move to the plugged roster. The Orphan Wells tab therefore shows the roster as it stands today, not a cumulative history.

The Register tab is deliberately wider. A well enters it if SONRIS currently lists it as an Act 404 orphan, if its SONRIS status history shows it was orphaned and then plugged (including plugs made years before the IIJA phase), or if it carries a field methane measurement. That is why the Register is substantially larger than the current roster, and larger than earlier published lists that counted only current orphans and wells orphaned since the 2023 baseline.

Legacy vs. IIJA plugs

Plugging events are classified as:

• IIJA plugs. Wells plugged under contractor bid packages funded by the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (§40601). A well is attributed to IIJA if the contractor milestone workbook names it in an IIJA campaign, or, failing that, if the contractor tracker records its job as construction complete. Tracker rows for work that was deferred, put on hold, or deducted from scope do not count as IIJA plugs, whatever the well's SONRIS status shows.
• USFWS refuge plugs. The Upper Ouachita National Wildlife Refuge campaign, funded federally through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and separate from IIJA. It is attributed from the same milestone workbook and is excluded from IIJA totals throughout the tracker. The workbook records milestone dates only, with no per-well cost and no methane volumes, so that tab carries no cost or emissions analytics.
• Legacy (state-funded) plugs. Every remaining plug event, drawn from the state OSR program's pre-IIJA funding streams (site-restoration fees, severance-tax allocations). Attribution is by source rather than by date: a plug event with no campaign record and no contractor-tracker record is counted as legacy. The series covers the OSR program era, which begins in FY1994: the program was created in 1993, and the eight orphan-to-P&A transitions SONRIS records from FY1990 to FY1992 belong to earlier state efforts, so they are excluded from every count in the tracker.
• Operator plugs. Wells plugged by a responsible operator outside the OSR program. A plug event is only counted when SONRIS shows the well moving straight from orphan status (code 23 or 26) to plugged (29, 30, 35 or 90), so a well returned to an operator before being plugged appears in no plugging count in this tracker.

The contractor workbook runs ahead of the SONRIS status feed, so a well cut and capped in the field can still carry an orphan status in the regulatory record. Those wells are counted in the campaign totals on the Plugging tab; the Register shows a plugging date only once SONRIS confirms the P&A status.

Site work is not counted as wells. The contractor milestone workbooks also record non-well activity at the same sites: tank battery decommissioning and derrick removal. That work carries a well serial number and a restoration date but never reaches cut and cap, because there is no wellbore to plug. Every well count in this tracker excludes it. It is reported only under locations restored, which is why the restoration total on a campaign can exceed the number of wells plugged.

Coastal & offshore classification

Each well is assigned a habitat tier based on surface location:

• Inland. Outside the Louisiana Coastal Zone Boundary. These wells appear on the Orphan Wells tab but not on the Coastal & Offshore tab.
• Coastal. Inside the Coastal Zone Boundary but on land or in inland water bodies (marsh, swamp, lakes). Coastal-zone geometry is sourced from CPRA / C&E.
• State offshore. Seaward of the shoreline and landward of the three-mile state-waters limit. Distance to coast is computed from SONRIS surface coordinates against the high-resolution Louisiana shoreline layer.

The Coastal & Offshore tab is restricted to wells falling inside the coastal-zone polygon. Within that set, each well is additionally given a habitat class taken from the USGS coastal vegetation layer: saline, brackish, intermediate or fresh marsh, swamp, or water. Anything with no vegetation class, or a class outside those types, is grouped as Upland / Other.

Wells with surface coordinates in navigable waters inside the coastal zone are labeled coastal rather than offshore; this matches how the OSR program procures contractor services.

Methane measurements

The tracker integrates leak-rate observations from three measurement tiers; chart tooltips indicate the tier used for each observation:

• LSU static chamber. Direct field measurements collected by the LSU research team using a static-chamber method, which captures low flux rates from the wellhead footprint and detects emissions below the Hi-Flow threshold.
• Contractor pre-plug measurements. Baseline leak rates recorded by OSR plugging contractors with a Hi-Flow sampler before cement is staged, following the C&E reporting protocol.
• Contractor pre- and post-plug pairs. Paired measurements that establish avoided-emissions volumes.

Social cost of methane

Each measured well’s annualized pre-plug leak rate is valued using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency social cost of methane (November 2023, Table A.5.1), discounted at the EPA 2 percent near-term Ramsey rate and summed over 2023 to 2050.

The three series shown on the Impacts tab are decline-rate scenarios, not discount rates: 0 percent, 2.5 percent and 5 percent describe how fast a leak is assumed to fall off across that window. A well that was never measured carries no social cost, which records an absence of measurement rather than a measurement of zero.

Economic impacts

Earnings, output, employment, value added and parish tax revenue are estimated with the Louisiana Economic Impact Model, using Regional Input-Output Modeling System (RIMS II) multipliers from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Plugging-contract spending is the input; the model distributes the resulting activity across census tracts and parishes. Effects are reported as direct (on-site contractor activity), indirect (supply chain) and induced (household re-spending), with total as their sum.

Scope. The model covers IIJA plugging only. The USFWS refuge campaign is funded federally through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is not part of the IIJA program, and is excluded from these figures. Only wells that have actually reached plugging are counted, since decommissioning activity follows work performed rather than work contracted.

Cost basis. A well enters the model at its billed contractor cost where an invoice exists, and at its modelled cost estimate otherwise. Contractor billing lags fieldwork by many months, and none of the wells plugged in the campaign running through August 2026 had been invoiced at the time of writing, so excluding unbilled wells would have shown a year of fieldwork as having no economic effect at all. The Impacts tab states how much of the basis is modelled rather than invoiced, so the estimated share is visible rather than implied.

Reading the spending figures. Program spend and direct output are different quantities and the difference is large. Direct output is spend after the Louisiana regional purchase coefficient, which is the share of each contractor dollar that stays in the state economy once imported goods and out-of-state labor are netted out. On the current multiplier table that coefficient is about 0.74, so direct output runs roughly a quarter below the spend that produced it.

Priority scoring

The C&E priority score integrates proximity to sensitive receptors (residences, surface water, drinking-water sources), wellbore condition, time since last production, and habitat sensitivity. Scores are produced by the OSR program and are not recomputed in this tracker. The full factor list and point values are on the Orphan Wells tab, under Priority scoring criteria.

Scores reach the tracker through a manual export from the SONRIS portal rather than the bulk data feed, so they cannot refresh on the same cycle as the rest of the tracker. A well added to the orphan roster since the last export carries no score and is shown as No Priority.

Note: the Louisiana Department of Energy and Natural Resources (DENR) was renamed the Department of Conservation and Energy (C&E) in October 2025. Program pages are still published on the denr.louisiana.gov domain, which carries the former department’s initials.