Well Done Foundation helps people adopt orphan springs

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The oil and gas industry loves to pat its chest and brag about how great they are, but they have a dirty little secret. Despite state and federal efforts to get them to clean it up themselves, they have found a way to avoid their obligation to repair the damage they do when they punch holes in the earth and make others pay to clean up the orphan wells that they have closed to seal. leave behind.

When a well is no longer used to pump oil and gas, it must be sealed with cement in a process called capping or plugging. But many have been left open, often in disrepair, polluting groundwater and leaking methane and other toxic gases such as hydrogen sulfide into the air. The pits can be extremely dangerous to people nearby. The companies that carry out the drilling are often small operators who sell all the oil and gas they can extract to larger oil and gas companies. Every state requires drillers to post a bond before starting a new well, which should guarantee that money is available to cap the well when needed, but the amount of the bond is often less than 5 percent of the costs of hedging.

When the well stops producing, the drilling company often abandons it and moves on to drill elsewhere. A favorite tactic is to sell the orphan wells to a shell company that is undercapitalized. If the company is pressured to clean up a water well, the company simply files for bankruptcy and leaves the taxpayers with the bill. You might be excused for thinking this sounds like a criminal enterprise, but for oil and gas companies it's business as usual. They get away with it because it all happens out of the public eye and the industry has bought enough accommodating politicians at the state and federal level to guarantee that no one will come after them for the money they are owed.

It's a scam, but a very effective one. Today there are estimated to be more than 3.5 million abandoned and orphaned wells in the U.S. The EPA estimates that abandoned wells will have collectively emitted 303,000 metric tons of methane in 2022, roughly equal to the amount of carbon dioxide that 23 methane-fired power plants could release in one year.

Orphan Wells leads to Well Done Foundation

In 2019, oil and gas industry veteran Curtis Shuck came across his first abandoned well. When he witnessed the way the orphan well was marring the landscape and leaking pollutants into the environment, he thought, 'This is embarrassing to me as someone who is in the business, and this cannot continue. This orphan well has been everyone's dirty little secret.' Shuck told the New York Times recently he immediately registered the domain name and non-profit registration for the Foundation Well Done. Since then, his organization has investigated more than 1,700 abandoned wells and plugged 44 of what they say are the most problematic.

Melissa and Bill Simmons bought a horse farm in Ohio in 2016, near Cuyahoga Valley National Park. There was an orphan well on the property next to the barn and about 100 yards from the landowners' home. (How ironic that wells can be drilled within 300 feet of a home, but a solar farm or wind turbine must be located half a mile from a home.) Nearly all the properties they considered in the region had old oil or gas wells. them. At first they thought, 'Everyone has these things,'” Melissa Simmons said. “It must be okay.”

The well on their farm was drilled in 1983 by a company called Pine Top, which is now bankrupt. About a year after moving in, the Simmons family noticed the well was leaking gas. Their children could hear it hissing as they did chores outside. When it rained and water pooled in the nooks and crannies around the well, the family would see gas bubbling up through the water. They ended up smelling gas in the shed and had to leave the doors open for fear the structure would explode.

Melissa Simmons contacted the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, which told her that state officials were dealing with a very long list of orphan wells — more than 20,000 documented in Ohio so far — and that hers did not warrant immediate action. But after many phone calls, an official told her about the Foundation Well Done and said the nonprofit might be able to help. They connected in late 2021, more than three years after the Simmons family first noticed the well was leaking. Curtis Shuck personally traveled to the farm to confirm they had a problem and agreed to take on the orphan well project.

North Carolina teens raise money for Wells Orphanage

Mateo De La Rocha is a high school student in Cary, North Carolina. He heard about the orphanage in Ohio and enlisted the help of two classmates: Sebastian Ng and Lila Gisondi. The three teenagers call themselves the Youth Climate Initiative. They managed to raise $11,000 for the well on the Simmons' property. “When Mateo approached me about this and I really looked at these methane sources and what we could do about them, it really flipped a switch,” Ng said. Previously, he hadn't felt like he could do much about climate change. He and his friends were just joking about the end of the world. What a world we have left to our young people! Gisondi said talking to her friends about these methane-emitting sources brought climate change from the back of her mind to the forefront. “It was something I felt like I could really help with.”

The students also convinced the Reimer Family Climate Crisis Fund, a small family foundation based in Austin, Texas, which had previously given money to Well done, to match their donations. The $11,000 the students raised will cover approximately 15 percent of the total cost of the project. Well done will cover the rest of the costs through other donations and sponsors. The three students now plan to raise money to cap a second well this summer.

“The problem is so big,” Shuck said, that the new federal funds provided by the Biden administration “are really just a down payment. There are so many resources, and these resources are so expensive.” Going forward, the oil and gas industry must be responsible for plugging its legacy wells, said Adam Peltz, an attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund who works on oil and gas issues. New York Times. The Bureau of Land Management recently increased the amount of money oil and gas companies must set aside for capping wells before they even start drilling, to prevent more orphan wells from being built in the future, but that will not help solve the problem of those wells. 3.5 million abandoned wells across America.

The takeaway

Some of the profits from orphaned sources have enriched the rogues' gallery of fossil fuel industry leaders who listened to the disgraced former president shake them down for a while. $1 billion in bribes He recently told them it would be a good investment for them because they would get a hundredfold return if he retakes the Offal Office and makes drilling more oil and gas wells a national priority.

But CleanTechnica readers will see this for what it is: another example of how people become fabulously wealthy by shifting the costs of doing business onto the backs of others. Then they all parade around and tell each other how hard they've worked and how proud they are to support the Supreme Court justices. It's called privatization of profits and socialization of costs and it's happening in every industry, but none is more open about it than fossil fuel companies, who believe with all their hearts that they have a God-given right to save the Earth to destroy in the pursuit of profit.

Curtis Shuck and the three North Carolina teenagers are to be congratulated for their altruism, but repairing the damage from these uncapped and abandoned orphan wells will require trillions of dollars. Maybe some of the lizards who benefited from this unholy scheme could throw in a few million dollars to atone for their sins? Naaah, don't hold your breath.