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For more than 150 years, Appalachia has provided the cheap energy that has powered the nation’s industrial growth and helped construct the middle class. But Appalachian communities did not fuel our nation’s prosperity without a cost – thousands of environmental hazards, remnants of our region’s legacy of extractive industries, burden our land. Abandoned mine sites and orphaned oil and gas wells deter development, hurt ecosystems, contribute to the climate crisis, and threaten the health and safety of nearby people. And in recent years, the oil and gas economy has crumbled, leaving many out of work. In less than a decade, the Ohio Valley Region, including Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, has lost 25,000 coal mining jobs and nearly 13,000 oil and gas jobs.
This staggering industry decline has not only hurt families, but had ripple effects across communities, forcing schools to close and a loss of essential services in places hardest hit. As federal policymakers design policies to transition and invest in a clean energy economy, it’s imperative that Appalachia can rebuild and grow a sustainable 21st century economy that builds shared prosperity.
In this edition of our newsletter, we introduce a pair of new ORVI reports and accompanying webinar series that describe an extraordinary opportunity to address the environmental and public health issues of abandoned mine lands and orphan wells while creating more than 30,000 well-paying, local jobs. Solving the climate crisis is a reemployment plan for the Ohio River Valley and an investment in the region’s future, protecting our communities now and ensuring the health of future generations to come.
We also feature ORVI Advisory Council member Tony Ingraffea, Professor Emeritus of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University and one of the nation’s preeminent fracking experts, and highlight An Energy State No More, Senior Researcher Sean O’Leary’s analysis of the declining West Virginian coal industry.
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| Advisor’s Corner: Meet Advisory Council Member Tony Ingraffea |
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Dr. Tony Ingraffea is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Emeritus, and a Weiss Presidential Teaching Fellow at Cornell University, where he has been teaching since 1977. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Notre Dame, a master’s degree in Civil Engineering from Polytechnic Institute of New York, and a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Colorado.
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Dr. Ingraffea has authored with his students and research associates over 250 papers on computer simulation and physical testing of complex fracturing processes. His fracking-related work is currently centered in the Ohio River Valley, where he is researching leaking shale gas wells in Pennsylvania and providing expert witness reports in three cases of nuisance to many families from shale gas development in West Virginia. Closer to home, Dr. Ingraffea is also advising the development of new deep earth source heat for the Cornell University campus.
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Webinar Series: Repairing the Damage from Orphan Wells and Abandoned Mine Lands
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ORVI and ReImagine Appalachia are excited to announce the release of a stunning set of new reports. These studies are the result of months-long research initiatives that have included dozens of stakeholders from across the country, and reveal massive environmental liabilities that the government isn’t tracking – as well as the enormous jobs potential of cleaning up these dangerous sites. With federal funding, Appalachian communities can reclaim and remediate abandoned coal mines and coal ash ponds left behind at shuttered power plants, putting them back to good use while cleaning up the Ohio River and its watershed tributaries. Orphaned oil and gas wells must also be capped.
Workers and resources from Appalachia have powered the American economy for more than a century, and Congress should prioritize Appalachian workers and communities as they prepare to invest in American infrastructure.
Please join us as we reveal how these proposed investments could create thousands of jobs for our region.
Register for our press conference here.
Wednesday, April 14th. at 10 a.m.
This event will be a brief overview of the key findings of both papers.
Register for our webinars here.
This link will register you for both webinars—you can attend one or both.
- Orphan Wells Webinar: 1 p.m., Wednesday, April 14th. This event will be an in-depth, hour-long presentation on the research and recommendations for tracking and plugging orphaned oil and gas wells in the Ohio Valley Region.
- Abandoned Mine Lands Webinar: 1 p.m., Thursday, April 15th. This event will be an in-depth, hour-long presentation on the research and recommendations for addressing the true scale of abandoned coal mines, improving the quality of reclamation and increasing the quality and quantity of jobs in this field.
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New Report: Repairing the Damage: Cleaning Up the Land, Air, and Water Damaged by the Coal Industry Before 1977
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For more than 200 years, the coal industry has extracted billions of tons of coal in the U.S., damaging thousands of acres of land and water and leaving it unreclaimed. Approximately 978,000 acres and $7.9 billion worth of damage has been cleaned up since 1977, but this represents only 23% of the total damage. Thousands of sites remain unreclaimed, threatening injury or death of nearby residents, deterring local development, harming local ecosystems and downstream residents, and contributing to climate change by releasing methane into the atmosphere.
The longer that Congress allows thousands of acres of AML-damaged land and water to linger, the more these sites threaten coalfield communities, downstream residents, and the planet, and the more it will cost taxpayers. The need to repair mine-scarred damage is urgent. It will require drastic increases in the scale of funding, as well as ambitious changes to policy.
ORVI Research Fellow Eric Dixon makes the case for a $13 billion federal appropriation for AML cleanup to address roughly half of remaining national AML damage in the next decade, supporting nearly 7,000 AML jobs per year from 2021-2030.
To address climate change and tackle the region’s persistent inequality head-on, though, we need to do more than increase the speed and scale of funding. Poverty has persisted for decades in many counties with mining damage and has disproportionately impacted women, people of color, and young people in coal regions. We also need a public reclamation jobs program within a revitalized Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to ensure reclamation jobs are accessible not only to the many former coal workers looking for work, but also to others in AML counties experiencing poverty and who may lack prior construction experience.
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New Report: Repairing the Damage from Hazardous Abandoned Oil & Gas Wells
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Across the U.S., millions of oil and gas wells are no longer in production but have no party legally or financially responsible for plugging them. These abandoned wells pose serious risks to public safety and our environment, leaking oil and gas into water, soil, and nearby homes, creating an explosion hazard and releasing tens of thousands of tons of climate-warming methane into the atmosphere each year.
There are an estimated 538,000 unplugged abandoned oil and gas wells in the Ohio River Valley states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky alone. While states allocate funds to plug and restore abandoned and orphaned wells, the scale and cost of the problem is likely beyond their reach. In 2018, only 2,372 orphan wells were plugged in the U.S. At this rate, it would take nearly 900 years for states to plug the estimated 2 million abandoned oil and gas wells across the nation.
Senior Researcher Ted Boettner explains how a federal well plugging program could create over 15,000 jobs per year over two decades that can provide significant social and economic benefits to distressed communities while reducing greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. The projected job creation of such a program is nearly equivalent to the decline in upstream oil and gas jobs in the region from 2014 to 2019. And a concerted federal effort to plug the region’s wells could abate 71,000 metric tons of methane each year, equivalent to the yearly greenhouse gas emissions of 383,000 passenger vehicles.
In the short-term, a minimum investment of $5 billion is needed to plug and restore more abandoned wells, improve administration, identify more wells and improve well reclamation. Over the long run, a federal program is needed that can continuously monitor and remediate these dangerous sites.
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An Energy State No More: As Coal Vanishes from the Grid, So Might West Virginia’s Status as an Energy State
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West Virginia’s status as an energy-producing state will likely come to an abrupt end within the next ten years, according to Senior Researcher Sean O’Leary. The state relies on coal for more than 90 percent of its electricity output. The problem is that coal is no longer cost-competitive as an energy resource, even before taking into account the externalized environmental and public health costs of coal combustion. Across the nation, market forces, even more than political ones, are inexorably eradicating coal from the U.S. electricity system.
West Virginia’s electric utilities have recovered operating losses from ratepayer subsidies, O’Leary writes, but, “in the end, the market will win out and coal-fired power will go.” In its stead, a just transition to a system built around renewable energy development and energy efficiency retrofits would reduce pollution and save the state money in the long run.
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ORVI in the News
How Biden’s Infrastructure Plan Could Create a Jobs Boom: In Fossil Fuels (CNN)
Joe Biden’s vision for a clean energy future isn’t just about spending billions on solar panels and wind farms. The White House also wants to hire hundreds of thousands of workers to clean up the relics of the nation’s fossil fuels past, writes Matt Egan for CNN Business. Biden’s American Jobs Plan calls for a $16 billion investment to plug the nation’s 2.1 million orphaned oil and gas wells and reclaim abandoned coal mines. According to ORVI Senior Researcher Ted Boettner, “This funding will provide a true path for many people in the fossil fuel industry to have good-paying jobs in the places they want to live, work and raise a family.”
Appalachian Fracking Faces Financial Risks, Report Warns. Hopes for Petrochemical Plastics Boom ‘Unlikely.’ (DeSmog)
Appalachia — already suffering from a long drawn out bust in the coal industry — has for much of the past decade seen natural gas prices languish as drillers pumped too much gas out of the ground, which has resulted in persistently low prices. And a renewed price surge appears unlikely as gas faces growing competition from solar and wind, Nick Cunningham writes. A recent report by ORVI and the Stockholm Environment Institute shows that developing new shale gas fields in Appalachia “may not end up being profitable” in the years ahead. The associated petrochemical buildout that the region has pinned its hopes on as the future of natural gas is also “unlikely.”
Fossil Fuel Companies Are Job Killers (The New Republic)
Despite the fossil fuel industry’s continued assertions that oil and gas “stand for jobs, prosperity, and the working man,” it’s increasingly unclear that the industry is actually capable of providing employment en masse, even with government help. The Ohio River Valley Institute has found that the 22 Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia counties responsible for 90 percent of the region’s oil and gas production saw their share of the nation’s jobs, personal income, and population all decline.
Every Pennsylvania Community Deserves Protection from the Harms of Fracking (Pennsylvania Capital-Star)
Sarah Martik, steering committee member of the People Over Petro Coalition and Campaign Director at Center for Coalfield Justice, argues that “all communities, whether rural or densely populated, deserve protection from the inherently dangerous, risk-laden process of hydraulic fracturing.” Martik cites ORVI’s recent report on the failed economic promise of the Appalachian fracking industry to “make it clear: fracking isn’t just bad for public health. What was advertised as an economic boom for the region has gone bust.”
Care Work is Climate Work (The New Republic)
What counts as infrastructure? It’s a tricky question when looking toward a climate-changed century, Kate Aronoff notes. Overhauling the economy to cool the planet will require expanding how we think of infrastructural investments to include care work, among other things. For example, “Ted Boettner, senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute, sees cleaning up abandoned mine lands and orphan wells as critical, along with Medicare for All, a federal job guarantee, and labor-intensive energy efficiency work, to repairing the damage caused by the fossil fuel economy and charting an economic future for the region that doesn’t depend on it.”
Appalachia’s Fracking Industry May Never Be Profitable Again (Gizmodo)
It’s clear that we need to stop natural gas production to avoid the worst effects of the climate crisis, writes Dharna Noor for Gizmodo. But a recent report from ORVI and the Stockholm Environment Institute “shows that there’s another reason companies should stop extracting shale gas in the nation’s Appalachian region: Expanding drilling is not even likely to be profitable.” Most projections call for two-thirds less natural gas use in 2040 compared to 2019.
Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Corner: Time for Appalachia to Thrive (Parkersburg News and Sentinel)
Eric Engle, Chairman of the Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action, Board Member for the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, and Co-Chairman of the Sierra Club of West Virginia Chapter’s Executive Committee, argues that “fossil fuel workers have powered and built America, but the industry has left Appalachia in ruins and today offers nothing but empty promises and lies. Our laborers, their families, and our communities deserve better.”
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What We’re Reading at ORVI
According to this week’s headlines, it’s increasingly clear that fossil fuels are on their way out. The clean energy transition is inevitable—and according to some, imminent. Here are the stories we’ve been reading (and listening to!):
- As the Shift to Green Energy Speeds Up, Shell’s Big Natural-Gas Bet Is at Risk (The Wall Street Journal) Falling renewables prices and a growing public appetite for clean energy are leaving natural gas—long seen by energy companies as a bridge between fossil fuels and renewables—in the lurch.
- Climate Change in Coal Country (Ohio Valley ReSource) Episode one of Ohio Valley ReSource’s new podcast, “Welcome to AppalachAmerica,” features a conversation with White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy on Biden’s plans for investment in coal-dependent communities.
- U.S. House Bill Seeks $8 Billion for Abandoned Oil and Gas Well Cleanup (Reuters) Representative Teresa Leger Fernandez introduced a bill last week authorizing $8 billion to plug and clean up abandoned oil wells nationwide, a measure aimed at creating jobs for oil and gas workers and reducing climate-warming emissions.
- Pennsylvania’s First Green Hydrogen Plant Planned for Lancaster County (StateImpact Pennsylvania) A clean fuel company plans to build Pennsylvania’s first green hydrogen plant in southern Lancaster County, along the Susquehanna River. The plant would produce 15 metric tons of liquid hydrogen per day, which the company says is enough to power 1,500 heavy duty trucks.
- Absolute Decoupling of Economic Growth and Emissions in 32 Countries (The Breakthrough) The past three decades of unprecedented economic growth have come at a cost: between 1990 and 2019, global emissions of CO2 increased by 56%. But, in recent years, we have seen more and more examples of absolute decoupling. — economic growth accompanied by falling CO2 emissions. Since 2005, 32 countries with a population of at least one million people have absolutely decoupled emissions from economic growth
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