Pennsylvania is ground zero for the abandoned oil and gas well crisis in the United States. The state’s long history of drilling, dating back to the late 1850s, has culminated in hundreds of thousands of unplugged wells that are spread across the state. Many of these wells are leaking harmful pollutants and hazardous chemicals that pose significant risk to human health, the environment, and the climate. Left unplugged, these wells can lower property values, contaminate the soil and groundwater, and leak harmful methane into the air. Improperly plugged oil and gas wells, including decommissioned shale gas wells, can also leak methane that adds greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
View Senior Researcher Ted Boettner’s testimony on Pennsylvania’s abandoned oil and gas well crisis before the Pennsylvania House Environmental & Natural Resource Protection Committee.
The number of abandoned wells in Pennsylvania is largely unknown since the state did not begin requiring permits for new wells until the mid-1950s. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP) has records for approximately 218,000 drilled wells in the state but estimates that as many as 560,000 oil and gas wells are unaccounted for in state records. The PADEP lists about 30,000 unplugged abandoned and orphaned wells that do not have viable operators and will require public funds to decommission or plug. There are also thousands of active unplugged idle wells that have not produced in years.
The number of abandoned and orphaned wells is poised to grow significantly if measures are not taken to hold operators accountable for the decommissioning of their wells. While Pennsylvania law mandates that wells that haven’t produced in a year be decommissioned, brought back into production or repurposed, or be put into regulatory inactive status, there is a long history of non-compliance among operators and a lack of enforcement by the PADEP. The incidence of non-compliance is especially acute among conventional well operators, which own a large portion of the state’s unplugged wells that produce very little oil and gas and are on the precipice of becoming abandoned.
The central aim of this report is to examine the state’s current compliance around well abandonment by exploring the problems with the state’s well inventory management and compliance process and to recommend policies and practices to ensure the proper decommissioning of the state well inventory today and into the future. Section One of the report provides a broad overview of the state’s oil and gas well inventory, including the status of wells, ownership, types and configurations of wells, and the state’s producing wells. After providing this overview of the well inventory, Section Two will review some of the problems with how the state’s well inventory management system is inhibiting a proper accounting of the state’s wells that need to be decommissioned. Section Three will explore the state’s compliance process regarding well abandonment and the “culture of non-compliance” that is contributing to the lack of enforcement measures taken by the PADEP, especially regarding notices of violation for failure to plug abandoned wells.
Section Four focuses on what could be the next wave of abandoned and orphaned wells in the state. While conventional wells make up the vast majority of producing and abandoned wells in the state, most conventional wells are uneconomic and their production is rapidly declining along with the funds to potentially decommission the wells. These low-producing wells are also a large contributor to methane leakage. The last part of this report, Section Five, makes recommendations to improve oil and gas well abandonment compliance policies and enact reforms to stem the tide of the state’s burgeoning abandoned well crisis and to ensure unplugged wells get decommissioned over the long run.