Well Done Foundation Helps People Adopt Orphan Wells

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The oil and gas industries like to thump their chests and brag about how wonderful they are, but they have a dirty little secret. Despite efforts at the state and federal efforts to make them clean up after themselves, they have found a way to walk away from their obligation to repair the damage they do when they tear holes in the Earth and make others pay to cap the orphan wells they leave behind.

When a well is no longer being used to pump oil and gas, it’s supposed to be closed off 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 like hydrogen sulfide into the air. The wells can be extremely dangerous for people nearby. The companies that do the drilling are often small operators who sell whatever oil and gas they can extract to larger oil and gas companies. Every state requires drillers to post a bond before they start a new well, which is supposed to guarantee there is money available to cap the well when necessary, but the amount of the bond is often less than 5 percent of the cost of capping.

When the well no longer produces, the drilling company often just abandons it and moves on to drill somewhere else. A favorite tactic is to sell the orphan wells to a shell company that is under-capitalized. If pressed to clean up a well, the company just files bankruptcy and sticks the taxpayers with the bill. You might be excused for thinking this sounds like a criminal enterprise, but it is business as usual for oil and gas companies. They get away with it because it is all done out of the public eye and the industry has bought enough compliant politicians at the state and federal level to guarantee that no one will be chasing them for the money they owe.

It’s a scam, but a highly effective one. Today, it is estimated there are more than 3.5 million abandoned and orphan wells in the US. The EPA estimates that abandoned wells collectively released 303,000 metric tons of methane in 2022, roughly equivalent to how much carbon dioxide 23 methane-fired power plants might release in one year.

Orphan Wells Lead To Well Done Foundation

In 2019, Curtis Shuck, a veteran of the oil and gas industry, came across his first abandoned well. When he witnessed the way that orphan well was disfiguring the landscape and leaking pollutants into the environment, he thought, “This is embarrassing for me as somebody who’s been in the business, and this can’t continue. This orphan well thing has been everybody’s dirty little secret.” Shuck told the New York Times recently he immediately secured the domain name and nonprofit registration for the Well Done Foundation. Since then, his organization has surveyed more than 1,700 abandoned wells and plugged 44 of what they identified as the most problematic of them.

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

The well on their farm had been drilled in 1983 by a company called Pine Top, which is now out of business. About a year after moving in, the Simmons family noticed the well was leaking gas. Their children could hear it hissing when they were outside doing chores. When it rained and water collected in the nooks and crannies around the well, the family could see gas bubbling up through the water. Eventually, they could smell gas inside the barn and had to leave the doors open for fear that the structure might explode.

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

North Carolina Teens Raise Money For Orphan Wells

Mateo De La Rocha is a high school senior in Cary, North Carolina. He heard about the orphan well in Ohio and enlisted the aid of two schoolmates — Sebastian Ng and Lila Gisondi. The three teens 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 into these methane wells and what we can do about it, it really kind of flipped a switch,” Ng said. Previously he he hadn’t felt like there was much he could do about climate change. He and his friends would would simply joke about the world ending. What a world we have bequeathed to our young people! Gisondi said that talking with her friends about these methane-emitting wells brought climate change from the back of her mind to the forefront. “It was something that I felt like I could actually help with.”

The students also persuaded the Reimer Family Climate Crisis Fund, a small family foundation based in Austin, Texas, that had previously given to Well Done, to match their donations. The $11,000 the students raised will cover approximately 15 percent of the project’s total cost. Well Done will cover the rest of the cost through other donations and sponsors. The three students now plan to begin raising funds to plug a second well this summer.

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

The Takeaway

Some of the profits from orphan wells have enriched the rogues gallery of fossil fuel industry leaders who listened to the disgraced former president shake them down for a $1 billion bribe recently, telling them it would be a good investment for them because they would see up to a hundred-fold return when he recaptures 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 putting what should be the costs of doing business onto the backs of others. Then they all strut around, telling each other how hard they worked and how proud they are to be propping up Supreme Court justices. It’s called privatizing profits and socializing cost and it happens in every industry, but none are more blatant about it than fossil fuels companies, who believe with all their hearts they have a God-given right to destroy the Earth in the pursuit of profits.

Curtis Shuck and the three teens from North Carolina are to be congratulated for their altruism, but the damage from these uncapped and abandoned orphan wells will take trillions of dollars to remediate. Perhaps some of the lizards who benefited from this unholy scheme might kick in a few million bucks to atone for their sins? Naaah, don’t hold your breath.