Description of the challenge.

The tool I'm going to use is storytelling. The challenge I plan to address is how to keep declining oil  assets globally from experiencing a catastrophic abandonment process, as seen in many  unconventional fields in the United States, in the year 2020. In the coronavirus crisis, hundreds to  thousands of wells are poorly abandoned and are releasing hundreds of thousands of tons of  methane into the atmosphere, worsening greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. Design  thinking is needed to address such problems as it involves not only  big and small operating  companies, but environmental authorities perform control tools, where abandonment and  decommunication operations are done even in a scenario where oil and natural gas exploitation is  no longer feasible.

The history of oil exploitation is more than 150 years old with conventional exploitation and 180  years with unconventional exploitation with gas wells already drilled from shale gas and oil since  1821 in Pennsylvania. The use of natural gas has since enabled the heating and night lighting of  hundreds of households with another appliances with a huge expansion of gas use has continued  to grow until December 2018, where solar panel and offshore wind technology are already  cheaper than the cheaper fossil alternative, understood as coal thermal, in European Countries.  This turning point points to a breaking point with global energy management where it is  understood that business-based renewable energy can already replace fossil energies. The lack or  absence of abandonment activities can be a potential environmental disaster with more warming  effect at the atmosphere in the decades to come.

The other breaking point in process is the use of cheap or nanotechnological materials for the  construction of batteries for storage and/or electric automotive. The Massachusetts Institute of  technology  MIT in August 2020 publishes that it has been successful with the experimental design  of sodium batteries in replacement of lithium batteries, which are expensive and their use is very  limited by the material scarcity of this element on earth. When advances in renewable energy  costs in conjunction with advances in the manufacture of batteries with low-cost materials are a  commercial reality, the oil industry as such would experience rapid or slow decline, which as a  result would leave an environmental liability of methane emissions, a greenhouse gas 32 times  more potent than carbon dioxide.

Once the oil industry faces a crisis where oil use is much lower than today, the management of oil  and gas assets should be aimed at leaving the least amount of oxide, waste and wells flowing  uncontrolled in rivers, lakes or soils.  That's why this problem is what requires design thinking the  most where everyone involved is part of this solution.

Application of the solution.

The use of natural gas in abandoned wells has been a very strong habit in communities near the oil  fields for more than 80 years. Under this reality, the story to tell about poorly abandoned wells is  that many communities can benefit for much longer than conventional gas exploitation in  abandoned oil fields. The story to be told is that communities must be trained in the use of low- potential wells under safety schemes and oil and gas well abandonments must be carried out by

the same oil and gas companies, or in any case fields must be ceded to companies purely engaged  in field dismantling and using soft technologies (untrained wells, portable drainage of oil wells.)

Communities can organize the way in activities whose low-pressure gas input can be used as raw  materials such as brick manufacturing, and building materials, an activity that will still require the  use of fossil fuels in many more decades to come, as soon as there are no low-energy alternatives  to conventional building materials.

The use of story telling is to educate communities on the safe use of gas in wells about to be  abandoned, but whose gas flow can be for decades to come.

On the other hand, non-productive but explosive wells must be effectively abandoned and  monitored by the environmental liability of oil spills caused by poorly abandoned wells.

There must also be an education for governments and local authorities to have technologically  capable equipment to replenish us for decades or hundreds of years because the problem of  abandoned wells will persist for hundreds to thousands of years.

The use of patents( low cost abandonment practices) to make an economic abandonment should  be an effort in design thinking derived from a widespread storytelling effort and within the  framework of the oil industry as a whole, because very few people know in depth the  environmental problem arising from frequent ruptures of abandoned wells.

Vision and Focus.

The use of TED or RSA presentations for the dissemination of such problems is a moral imperative  for environmental authorities in any oil and gas-producing country. Also, it is necessary to speak  with magazines and website about giving adequate dissemination of data, to warning people,  government and communities to avoid contamination from wasted oil and gas fields.

The communities in my own country are rural villages and has an extremely low level of formal  education and must be used comic based material to explain a very complex technical problem.

The future history of the environmental liability of abandoned wells should be told to companies  to governments and to communities in such a way that there are:

1.A massive abandonment of wells well done at the end of their productive life.

2. Prevent a very hasty decline in the use and price of oil from implying catastrophic  environmental liability for future generations.

3. The low-cost use of a declining asset for the use of low-cost industries, such as brick  manufacturing or its use as local energy for high-dispersion industries such as farms.

4. Reuse of wells such as water-supplying wells or for water pouring into confined aquifers  currently used under environmentally safe conditions.

5. Use of low cost technology for safe and cheap abandonments.

6. The formulation of new low-cost abandonment technologies that are more permanence than  current low durability steel coating sealing technologies.

The history of bad abandonment has been told several times by the Colombian and world media,  with completely degraded areas, such as Lake Maracaibo (a lake with continuous spills from  abandoned producing areas) and areas of soils with high salinities such as the Middle Magdalena  Valley in Colombia. This approach has caused abandonment activities to accelerate, but they have  the implication that the public image of oil companies has been greatly damaged.

A company with a very bad image in the long run represents that the political cost of a bailout is  unlikely and all outstanding environmental recovery activities are compromised in a 20- to 30-year  scenario where oil and gas have no economic value.

That's why the abandonment process is not a long-term problem, but a problem that there are  only resources to solve in the small window of opportunity where oil companies are still profitable  and have technological support and equipment to do the right thing with wasted oil and gas fields.

What needs to be done differently is that abandonment activities are not solely the responsibility  of operating companies but that there is fiscal control of all the actors of the problem, as  mourners and responsible for the action in the abandonment of oil and gas fields in the world.

