Thank you Dr. Anthony Ingraffea, for standing strongly against the public paying to clean up oil and gas industry’s world-wide polluting life-threatening leaking abandoned dirty laundry: “It’s the industry that drilled the well. It’s the industry that made money from the well. It’s the industry that was supposed to follow regulations for proper design, proper construction, proper maintenance and ownership of that well forever — and now they are saying let the taxpayers pay for it? No. No. The money has to come from the shareholders. The money has to come from the coffers of the oil and gas industry. They made the mess. They clean it up”
It never ends: damning new study after study, contamination case after contamination case, home/water explosion after explosion, fire after fire, death after death while industry, its enabling regulators, judges, lawyers and politicians lie and lie to enable the harms.
A comment to the post:
Awesome list of studies
We always knew it they always knew it
Now they want others to pay for another externality
Drilling for oil and gas has a long history in the U.S., dating all the way back to 1859 when the first successful commercial oil well — the Drake Well — was drilled in northwestern Pennsylvania. This long history has made the state ground zero for abandoned wells, which often leak dangerous pollution into the environment and potent greenhouse gases like methane into the air.
It is estimated there may be a few hundred thousand abandoned wells in Pennsylvania — some located in the woods, along riverbanks, in people’s yards and even inside their homes. These wells are left behind — orphaned to the state — after their owners, often oil and gas companies, go bankrupt or when the wells fall into disrepair.
Once in state hands, it is the government’s responsibility to plug the wells when they break. The EPA estimates there may be over 2 million abandoned wells across the nation.
In early June, we followed Don Cornell of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to an emergency call in the town of Bradford to plug a leaking well in someone’s backyard.
“This old oil and gas well came in because the landowner had a complaint. He noticed he had a puddle of oil in his backyard,” explained Cornell.
Cornell says most of the wells that they deal with are from the early 1900s; there is no current owner and the companies are long gone or went bankrupt. “They didn’t take care of the wells back when they were first drilled and walked away,” he said.
“I’ve been in this position now for almost 11 years and I’m still amazed with what we come across, where the wells are in streams in the river — islands on the Allegheny River, there’s wells there,” Cornell said.
Even inside people’s houses?
“Yep. In basements and foundations, they’re just everywhere. And their driveways, when they don’t know about it until one day oil start seeping up through their driveway.”
Leaking wells are not only a local environmental hazard — they can also be a big contributor to warming the climate. Dr. Tony Ingraffea, a Cornell University professor and expert in this field, says many of these wells leak methane — a greenhouse gas much more potent than carbon dioxide.
“Especially during the first 10 years, that methane molecule traps 100 times [the heat] that carbon dioxide does,” Ingraffea explained. That’s why he says says there is an urgency to plugging these wells: “Turn down methane and you get an immediate response.”
A recent U.N. report found that cutting methane emissions is the “strongest lever” humanity has to slow climate change this decade and keep warming below catastrophic levels.
Cornell says there are over 10,000 documented wells in his state and possibly hundreds of thousands more that are undocumented. But the problem is funding. Right now, Pennsylvania has a yearly budget of about $1.5 million for this work, but Cornell says that only covers about 30 wells a year.
That’s why the state is hoping for a windfall from the federal government. In President’s Biden’s climate plan, he proposed $16 billion to plug wells and clean up abandoned mines. So far, this funding has survived, and made it into the bipartisan infrastructure deal.
Cornell said the federal money “would be huge” for Pennsylvania. “The public safety aspect. Stopping pollution. The jobs for contractors and citizens to come out and do this work. It would be huge.”
While these wells are a big environmental threat, experts say they are also a huge job creation opportunity, especially for displaced fossil fuel workers.
A new study by Ted Boettner of the Ohio Valley River Institute, a clean energy group, finds that plugging abandoned wells in the four-state area of Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia and Pennsylvania alone could create over 15,000 jobs per year over 20 years.
Berardelli: “So this is a win-win. We’re stopping methane from getting into the atmosphere and we’re putting a lot of people to work?”
Boettner: “Yeah, absolutely. These are economically distressed areas that suffer greatly from the deindustrialization and the collapse of the coal industry as well. This is about creating jobs where people want to work and want to live and not about training them, or dislocating people to places they don’t want to be.”
Ingraffea agrees, but he argues the oil and gas companies should bear most of the burden.
“It’s the industry that drilled the well. It’s the industry that made money from the well. It’s the industry that was supposed to follow regulations for proper design, proper construction, proper maintenance and ownership of that well forever — and now they are saying let the taxpayers pay for it? No. No. The money has to come from the shareholders. The money has to come from the coffers of the oil and gas industry. They made the mess. They clean it up,” Ingraffea said.
But in Boettner’s view, the problem is just too big and money from the federal government can go a long way to help.
“In 2018 states only spent about $53 million. Plugging orphan wells, if you look at the entire problem, that number could be about over $60 billion around this country, just dealing with the orphan wells,” he said. “So states are really struggling to deal with this problem. And this is a good example where the federal government can come in and provide some investment and get people back to work in jobs that they want to have.”
Jeff Berardelli is a meteorologist and climate specialist for CBS News.
And, when drinking water is contaminated with industry’s abandoned or leaking new shale wells leaking methane? Or Encana/Ovintiv intentionally illegally frac’ing a community’s drinnking water aquifers? Authorities and polluters blame nature and or the water well owner (for being dirty), of course.
In above photo, a Quebec cattle producer’s methane contaminated water on the left; Ernst’s methane and ethane contaminated water on the right.
My methane and ethane and who knows what mystery frac chemicals contaminated water after Encana/Ovintiv illegally frac’d my community’s drinking water aquifers, with regulator fraud and cover-up to help them get away with it. Encana also frac’d drinking water aquifers in Pavillion Wyoming with similar regulator fraud and cover-up assistance.
Many more posts of explosions and fatalities from industry knowingly causing methane to leak into buildings, homes, and aquifers, with companies and athorities not warning impacted communities, and after the murders, blaming nature with regulators, politicians and NGOs dancing happily along. There’s not enough time for one (unpaid) person to list them all.
The fraudulent industry, regulator and expert investigation into the 1985 California Dress for Less explosion inspired the criminal idea to blame bacteria – no matter what caused the leak(s) or how many are injured/killed and how many non-oil patch businesses are destroyed:
A devious set-up, threatening life on earth everywhere, only to make a few people richer.
Years later, the truth came out:
Still reguators, NGOs, courts, and politicians enable the Big Lie and innocent families blow up and are killed in their own homes.
How many “natural” wild fires are made worse by the oil and gas industry’s leaking methane?
… It was April 19, 1973 when hundreds of craters and geysers mysteriously appeared around the village near Traverse City. The 100 to 150 craters ranged from teacup-size fissures to sinkholes measuring up to 25 feet wide and 15 feet deep.
State officials eventually determined the outbreak was caused by gas seeping underground from a natural gas drilling operation four miles away, but not before most of the town’s 450 people were evacuated and displaced for months.
M-72, a highway that was just 3 years old at the time of the incident, was virtually destroyed and the community’s town hall was also threatened, according to a United Press International story published on April 20, 1973.
“The town hall was on the verge of toppling today as gaseous, bubbling craters popped open threatening a massive gas eruption,” the article stated.
“The earth around town hall is almost completely eaten up,” said Grand Traverse County Police Sgt. Tom Schmuckal in the article. “It is less than a foot from surrounding the entire foundation.”
Well E1-22, located south of Williamsburg and owned by Amoco Production Co., then a subsidiary Standard Oil of Indiana, was first indicted by a Department of Natural Resources spokesmen as the cause of the eruptions in the article. … Many feared that a single spark could set off a massive explosion in the community. …