In April 2025, workers with Lambda Energy Resources doing routine maintenance on a pipeline in Pigeon River Country State Forest discovered a leak.
The line was immediately shut down, but by that point, more than 4,600 gallons of material spilled into a densely forested wetland in Cheboygan County: at least 50 barrels of crude oil, 60 barrels of brine, a saltwater byproduct, and 100 gallons of condensate, or natural gas liquids.
At the time, regulators hoped clean up wouldn't exceed more than a few months. It's now been eight months, and a fully remediated site does not appear to be possible in the near future.
"The inaccessibility is what makes the Pigeon [River Country] so beautiful, and it's also become a barrier in remediation," said Josef Greenberg, a spokeperson with Michigan's Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, which is overseeing the clean up.
Crews had to construct roads into the area, and clean up was further complicated by damage from the spring ice storm in the region.
"It's such a remote location, there's no infrastructure, there's no access points," Greenberg said. "If this would have happened in an open field, we probably would have been a lot further along in the remedial process, but it's a huge challenge. So it's just going to take time."
It could take years, according Michel Boufadel, an engineering professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology who specializes in oil spills and water technology.
"Wetlands are considered the most vulnerable to an oil spill," Boufadel said.
The combination of crude oil and brine at the site poses another problem.
"That's really a bad combination in terms of environmental damage, because the oil is lighter than water [and] floats on the surface, whereas the brine is much heavier than water, so it tends to sink," Boufadel said. "So in the vertical you have the maximum spreading of the whole release."
According to documents from the Pigeon River Country Advisory Council, a thick layer of organic material below the wetland helped with cleanup efforts in this case by preventing contaminants from seeping into soils below.
What began in April as contamination of one acre has now spread to four and a half acres, about the size of a Major League Baseball field, in a wetland of 165 acres. Groundwater in the area has also been contaminated, and low levels of chloride from the brine have spread into two tributaries.
"The [chloride] levels are at one-sixth of the toxic level, but that's still considered harmful to the flora and fauna of the area," said Greenberg, with EGLE. Those chloride levels are akin to road salt, he added.
There are no drinking wells nearby.
In drone footage of the site, clusters of brown trees — either dead or stressed — are visible. As of Friday, Dec. 12, all eight of the sump pumps pumping out contaminated groundwater had frozen and were nonfunctional.
Boufadel said that although the pumps have frozen, groundwater contamination is not likely to spread much or at all without a major rain event. How contamination spreads through groundwater is also dependent on distance from streams and major rivers.
As of October, 137,544 gallons of contaminated groundwater and 3,300 tons of contaminated soil have been removed. Absorbent booms and monitoring wells have been in place since the spring.
In June 2025, another, much smaller leak occurred at the same site, releasing mostly brine and some crude oil. Regulators think that release was caused by heavy machinery and trucks moving in and out of the location for remediation purposes. The leaking flow line has since been replaced.
According to a document from the U.S. Department of Transportation, a federal representative inspected Lambda Energy's control room in Kalkaska in the summer of 2024.
In a warning letter to Lambda from October 2025, the federal government wrote that "Lambda could not demonstrate it had an effective system for detecting leaks" during its inspection. The company was given a warning to better comply with federal pipeline safety regulations or risk hefty federal fines.
Lambda did not respond to request for comment.
The Texas-based energy company has more than 100 miles of oil and natural gas pipelines which run from Manistee County northeast into Cheboygan and Montmorency counties.
