There are approximately three and a half million abandoned oil or gas wells in the nation.

Kentucky is no exception, hosting an estimated 14,000 and counting.

These so-called orphaned wells can pose several environmental hazards.

Now the state is partnering with the Kentucky Geological Survey to plug these orphan wells and study their impact.

We are on the site in Wolf County, Kentucky, of an orphaned whale that were in the process of measuring the methane leakage, gas leakage from that well.

It's part of our federal plugging initiative to identify orphan wells and to address them by plugging and reclamation to restore the site to beneficial land use.

This is a whale that is not in any system with the Kentucky Geological Survey or the Division of Oil and Gas.

It's an orphaned whale.

We don't know its history.

They're covered in Perhaps two thirds of Kentucky's counties have a presence of an orphaned whale.

It's important because some of these wells are creating active damage with environmental leakage, gas leakage, or crude oil leakage or groundwater leakage.

Some of them are near people's houses.

Some of them are impacting streams.

It's become increasingly aware that methane is a very potent greenhouse gas and our ability to be methane emissions, say, over the next decade can very much impact kind of the trajectory of global warming over the next 30 or 40 years.

So I saw an opportunity to actually do some real good on the greenhouse gas front.

We believe there are about 15,000 orphan wells across the Commonwealth.

But by fact, we find new wells every month.

What you have to understand is that oil and gas drilling in Kentucky began 100 years before oil and gas laws were enacted.

So we've got a lot of catch up to do.

There are a lot of undocumented, unmapped wells that, you know, we don't have any history on.

Happens a lot with farmers.

They're clearing a field or somebody is building a house or a development and they find these pipes or wells sticking out of the ground.

So a lot of times the landowner may not know they're there.

Kentucky has oil and gas producing regions and some more dominant than others.

There are major areas of oil production over our history.

Oil and gas drilling has been going on for over 150 years, but South central Kentucky, east, central Kentucky, we're here in Wolf County in the big seeking area and west Kentucky and Illinois coalfields.

There are basically four key regions in Kentucky that have a high density of wells develop.

We measured 40 wells, both western Kentucky, the south central part of the state and the eastern part of the state.

And what we see so far is that the majority of the wells, probably 75 to 80% of the wells, actually have very little methane.

And when I say little methane, I mean less than a gram per hour.

So the grand per hour is a threshold that the Department of Interior is using to designate wells as either non emitters or emitters.

So most of our wells fall into this kind of low emitter to non emitter category.

There are 20 to 25% of the wells, however, that admit significant amounts of methane.

And that finding in which a small percentage of wells accounts for the majority of emissions is similar to other studies that have been conducted in the eastern U.S. and the Appalachian Basin region.

A lot of wells set out in the middle of active road crop fields such as soybean and corn fields.

And so these farmers, basically that area around the wellbore is a non callable non arable land for them.

So it's basically a fallow spot.

And in a worst case situation, there's actually soil contamination, say, from leaking oil.

But in the longer term and on a global scale, methane that comes out of here just doesn't stay encamped in Kentucky.

It gets circulated to the atmosphere and circulates globally and contributes to the overall greenhouse gas loading of the atmosphere and adds to the loading potential, the warming potential of the atmosphere.

Since the partnership began, nearly 600 orphaned oil and gas wells in Kentucky have been sealed.