This 2003 Spring Semi-Annual Report contains a summary of the Final Technical Report being prepared for the Soil Remediation Requirements at Commercial and Centralized Drilling-Fluid Disposal (CCDD) Sites project funded by the United States Department of Energy under DOE Award No. DE-AC26-99BC15225. The summary describes (1) the objectives of the investigation, (2) a rationale and methodology of the investigation, (3) sources of data, assessment of data quality, and data availability, (4) examples of well documented centralized and commercial drilling-fluid disposal (CCDD) sites and other sites where drilling fluid was disposed of, and (5) examples of abandoned sites and measures undertaken for their assessment and remediation. The report also includes most of the figures, tables, and appendices that will be included in the final report.

For a variety of reasons, thousands of oil and gas wells have been abandoned in the Gulf Coast Region of the United States. Many of these wells penetrated geopressured zones whose resource potential for power generation was undervalued or ignored. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Geopressured-Geothermal Research Program was chartered to improve geothermal technology to the point where electricity could be commercially produced from a substantial number of geopressured resource sites. This research program focused on relatively narrow technical issues that are unique to geopressured resources such as the ability to predict reservoir production capacity based on preliminary flow tests. Three well sites were selected for the research program. These are the Willis Hulin and Gladys McCall sites in Louisiana, and the Pleasant Bayou site in Texas. The final phase of this research project consists of plug and abandonment (P&A) of the wells and site restoration.

The Big Hill SPR facility located in Jefferson County, Texas has been a permitted operating crude oil storage site since 1986 with benign environmental impacts. However, Congress has not authorized crude oil purchases for the SPR since 1990, and six storage caverns at Big Hill are underutilized with 70 million barrels of available storage capacity. On February 17, 1999, the Secretary of Energy offered the 70 million barrels of available storage at Big Hill for commercial use. Interested commercial users would enter into storage contracts with DOE, and DOE would receive crude oil in lieu of dollars as rental fees. The site could potentially began to receive commercial oil in May 1999. This Environmental Assessment identified environmental changes that potentially would affect water usage, power usage, and air emissions. However, as the assessment indicates, changes would not occur to a major degree affecting the environment and no long-term short-term, cumulative or irreversible impacts have been identified.