Wheatley, Ont., is trying to move on from the explosion that rocked its downtown core in 2021. But the threat of additional inactive gas wells lingers.
Photo: Matt McIntosh / The Narwhal
The first time I saw a pumpjack on the landscape, perched over a deep well, was when I moved to northeastern British Columbia. Born and raised in Toronto, this sort of oil and gas infrastructure wasn’t a familiar sight.
And yet, there are about 27,000 recorded oil and gas wells in Ontario — plus tens of thousands that have been drilled but don’t exist in official records. They may be out of sight, but they aren’t out of mind in communities like Wheatley, Ont., where in 2021 an old, leaky gas well led to an explosion that razed several downtown buildings and injured 20 people.
Investigators found and sealed three inactive wells — and then another in 2024. This summer, a fresh leak detected nearby nearly cancelled Canada Day festivities. “Now we’re playing whack-a-mole,” Howard Gabert, the chair of a local recovery task force, told freelance reporter Matt McIntosh.
While the province is putting some funds towards properly sealing old wells, it’s nowhere near enough to address the issue. Even still, new wells are being drilled across the province, and the government isn’t collecting enough in financial securities to cover the remediation costs, should a company become insolvent.
“The public is led to believe the security will look after the wells and site remediation. This is simply not the case,” a consultant wrote in an email to the government, which Matt obtained through freedom of information legislation.
As the province moves ahead with a new law to allow underground storage of captured carbon, finding and sealing old wells is even more pressing — find more on that, and other key takeways from the investigation, in this explainer.
Gabert said living in Wheatley is “like living under a volcano.” As I become more aware of the unseen things under my feet, I’m starting to understand what he means.
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What do reporters for The Narwhal have in common with oil and gas companies? They’re enthusiastic about digging deep! Remind your friends to subscribe to our newsletter for in-depth reporting on Canada’s extractive industries they won’t find anywhere else.
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