Abandoned Wells in PA
On the off chance you are running short on things to worry about, you may want to take a moment to consider the more than 200,000 abandoned oil and gas wells in Pennsylvania. That’s the official estimate from state officials but the actual number could be as high as 700,000 according to a recent study cited in an article by Spotlight PA. “Abandoned wells are not simply holes in the ground,” the article continues, “methane, the main component in natural gas, can leak [from them] into the atmosphere where it has 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide over a two-decade period.” The wells can also sometimes leak fluids that pollute streams and ground water and have a significant local impact on air quality and human health.
Drilling wells for oil and gas has been a major thing in Pennsylvania since 1859 when Edwin Drake struck oil in Titusville. According to the website Today in Conservation, “That well was soon producing 40 barrels of oil per day. One observer noted that Drake’s well could produce in a few days the same amount of oil as a whaling ship on a four-year voyage. Western Pennsylvania became the center of the oil industry, producing half of the world’s supply for the next 40 years.”
But well drilling, and coal mining, have left Pennsylvania deeply scarred. Unplugged, abandoned wells are, as one observer stated, “leaky and dangerous relics” of a more than 150-year era of disregard for the natural world and for the wellbeing of our families and communities. Unfortunately, it seems that era of disregard is far from over in Pennsylvania.
According to the article from Spotlight PA, “A recent report from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection found well operators routinely fail to plug wells as required” after those wells are no longer producing gas or oil. Many also fail to file legally-mandated production reports on their wells. “Between 2017 and 2021, 57% of well operators failed to submit mandatory production reports to the state…. During that same time period, the agency [DEP] issued 3,123 citations for failure to plug a well once it was abandoned…. Other frequent violations include spills of drilling fluids onto the ground or into water, and improper or unpermitted waste disposal.”
When companies fail to plug their out of service wells as required by law, the taxpayer must pick up the tab for capping them. You might think that the state could require these companies to post a bond before drilling, a bond that would cover the full cost of dealing with the problem when companies fail to do so. In Pennsylvania, in fact, a bond is required but for an amount much lower than the actual cost of capping a well, $2500 for a conventional well when the average cost for capping a well is $33,000 and can go as high as $800,000 when conditions are unfavorable. Bonds for unconventional wells—like those created by hydraulic fracturing—range from $4000-$10,000, also well below the actual cost of capping.
In addition, a bill passed by the state legislature in the summer of 2022, and allowed by Governor Tom Wolf to become law without his signature, has frozen these limits for required bonds for wells in place. According to The Slick, a nonprofit newsletter reporting on energy and climate issues, “The bill also strips the Environmental Quality Board, an independent body that approves rules made by the Department of Environmental Protection, of its ability to raise these amounts for conventional wells for 10 years.” Apparently, Wolf allowed the bill to become law as part of a deal with Republican lawmakers to increase funding for education. Unfortunately, this limit on bonds could jeopardize some $40 million in federal funding for capping wells in PA from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act since that law requires that states pass stricter—not looser and lower—bonding regulations.
Compelling as these numbers are in themselves, it’s important to step back and consider the choices implied in them. For more than a century and a half, Pennsylvania’s legislature and governors have allowed companies to push the true cost of extracting fossil fuels onto our communities and taxpayers, and onto our forests and streams. DEP, whose mission is partly to regulate this industry but also to protect our people and natural resources, has been chronically underfunded and under-resourced.
What were they thinking, those legislators and governors? What are they thinking now? Time to write them, I think, and find out.
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