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Now, the bipartisan infrastructure bill President Biden signed into law last year is changing the calculus around this growing environmental challenge. The law, which authorized a record $4.7 billion for states’ efforts to plug abandoned wells, has sparked a scramble among state officials to document wells within their borders.
As a result, states have now reported more than 120,000 abandoned wells in total, a nearly 50 percent increase from the 81,000 wells they reported last year, according to a new analysis of state data by researchers at the Environmental Defense Fund and McGill University.
Even this figure can mask the true extent of the problem. By some estimates, the number of undocumented abandoned wells in the United States – those that have yet to be discovered – could be as high as a million.
“It would be wonderful to be able to map all the rights of orphans in the country, there could be a million or more, but we can only map those documented by definition,” said Adam Peltz, director and senior attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund who worked on analysis. “It speaks to the principle that this is a big problem.” We still have a lot to do to find these wells and get them under control.”
Abandoned wells — also known as “orphan wells” because no owner can be found — can release toxic substances such as arsenic, formaldehyde and benzene, polluting the air and groundwater. Using census data, the analysis found that 14 million people live within one mile of an orphan well, including 1.3 million adults with asthma. Exposure to polluted air can worsen asthma symptoms, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Orphan wells can also emit methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that causes climate change. Responsible for about a third of global warming today, methane traps about 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide during its first 20 years in the atmosphere.
In January, the Interior Department announced that states could apply for an initial $1.15 billion in federal grants to fund the capping and cleanup of abandoned wells. The department noted that the grants will be based on three criteria: the number of documented orphaned wells in each state, the estimated cost of cleaning up the wells in each state and job losses in each state from March 2020 to November 2021.
“The department has a thoughtful and methodical approach to implementing orphaned oil and gas programs that aim to get money to states as quickly as possible while being responsible for stewardship of taxpayer dollars,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement.
In August, Interior awarded an initial $560 million to 24 states to begin capping and remediating more than 10,000 orphaned wells. Twenty-two states received $25 million each, while Arkansas and Mississippi each received $5 million to measure methane emissions from wells and begin shutting them down.
Researchers from the Environmental Defense Fund and McGill University conducted a similar analysis of abandoned wells last year, before the infrastructure bill was passed. This year, they found a dramatic increase in documented wells in certain states that updated their databases in response to federal funding.
Ohio, which received $25 million in federal money, reported the most abandoned wells of any state — 20,439 — in the most recent analysis, compared with just 891 wells in last year’s analysis.
Stephanie O’Grady, a spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, said in an email that the department identified the additional wells through a comprehensive review of its records. She added that while the department employs 26 people in its orphan well program, it is looking for more qualified contractors to plug the wells — a challenge for the Biden administration as it seeks to implement the infrastructure law in a way that creates good-paying jobs.
Pennsylvania, which also received $25 million in federal money, had the second-highest number of wells this year — 18,471 — compared with 8,840 last year.
Jamar Thrasher, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, said in an email that the number of undocumented wells in the state could be much higher — a consequence of the state’s historical reliance on fossil fuels to power its economy.
“While the exact number of unfilled wells remains unknown due to Pennsylvania’s long history of oil and gas exploration,” Thrasher said, the department “estimates there may be at least an additional 200,000 undocumented abandoned oil and gas wells in the Commonwealth.”
In thousands of cases, smaller oil and gas companies have abandoned wells after bankruptcy, leaving taxpayers on the hook to clean them up. To proactively address this problem, federal and state laws require oil and gas companies to post pre-drilling bonds — a form of financial guarantee that wells will be plugged if the companies shirk their responsibility.
But under current bonding schemes, the state coffers are woefully underfunded. To ensure adequate remediation funding, some advocates have called on the Interior Bureau of Land Management to update the bond requirements for oil and gas development on federal lands. The Western Organization of Resource Councils, a regional network of eight grassroots groups, recently filed a petition calling on the agency to develop tougher bonding rules.
“Congress recently appropriated $4.7 billion to cap and restore abandoned wells, but this funding addressed only a small portion of the growing public liability of orphan wells across the nation and did not address the root cause,” the petition says. “The problem of abandoned federal wells will be better solved in the long term with sufficient connectivity.”
In a statement, Cole Ramsey, vice president of upstream policy at the American Petroleum Institute, did not directly address whether the powerful trade group supported the updated tying rules, but said the industry “takes action every day to address the permanent shutdown of natural gas and oil wells.” .” Ramsey added that the group introduced a new industry standard last year that provides guidance on proper well closure and remediation.
Interior spokesman Tyler Cherry declined to comment on the petition or the analysis of the abandoned wells.
Even without federal action, some states are racing to tighten their bond rules. Regulators in Colorado, the fifth-largest oil producer among the states, approved new financial requirements for oil and gas companies in March. The rules require companies to provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional funds to cover potential cleanup costs, with the goal of better protecting taxpayers.
“Colorado has handled its orphan problem pretty well, and kudos to them,” Peltz said. “The rest of the country needs to do it now, too.”
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