Defunct Oil Wells Are a National Problem. Finding Them Is the First Step

“If it’s potentially economically viable for the Osage Nation, we cannot plug it,” says Walker, of the Osage Department of Natural Resources.

The costs of inaction

There’s an environmental cost to letting orphan wells linger. Natural gas — which is obviously found in gas wells, and often associated with oil deposits — is also known as methane. It’s a fuel when it’s in a pipeline and a pollutant when it leaks into the air. In fact, it’s a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

On a hillside in Osage County, Arthur’s employee Dan Caldwell sets up an optical gas imaging camera, an expensive machine that makes invisible gas leaks visible. The nearby wells look good. But they’re connected to some old tanks. “I think there’s a plume,” Caldwell says, and zooms in.

Arthur steps over to take a look. The view through the camera is disorienting, a pixelated grayscale landscape. But there it is: a little stream of planet-warming gases, rising up into the air.

Old oil and gas wells are not the top source of methane. Agriculture, landfills and active oil and gas production are all bigger offenders. And it’s tricky to calculate the climate effects, because there’s huge variation in how much wells leak; some release a lot of methane, others none at all. But it’s not negligible. According to government estimates, old oil wells as a whole (including orphan wells) have a bigger climate footprint than all the motorcycles in the country.

And orphan wells are a particularly odious source of the pollution because they provide no societal benefit at all. They are not a source of food or energy. They don’t even make anybody money any more.

Methane isn’t the only risk; there are other chemicals like hydrogen sulfide that can work up from underground. “These wells can impact people, the environment, groundwater, surface water, soils — all these different things over time,” Dan Arthur says.

Will there be more orphans?

Finding the perhaps one million existing orphan wells is a daunting enough challenge.

But Adam Peltz, of the Environmental Defense Fund, says they are only half the problem. “We have a million active wells that all eventually need to be plugged — and in the absence of policy change, a lot of them will become orphan too,” he says.

That’s because right now, companies have an economic incentive to keep wells open as long as possible, even if they aren’t being used. Wells at the end of their lifespan are often sold to other companies, whether small operators or big corporations, that specialize in older “marginal” or “stripper” wells. A tiny dribble of oil from those wells can still be profitable. Or owners might let wells lie dormant, arguing they might have economic potential in the future.

But that increases the risks that some of these companies, particularly the smaller ones, will go bankrupt with unplugged wells on their books. Then they become the taxpayers’ problem.

There are rules — state, tribal, and federal — that are meant to prevent this from happening. But in many cases those rules have either been too weak or too easily skirted, and orphan wells continue to be created.

And making the rules stricter would add costs for oil producers. The oil industry lobbies fiercely against such changes, arguing any state that adopts them would drive producers to friendlier regions, causing a blow to state coffers.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs sums up the dilemma from an oil regulator’s perspective: “The regulation necessary to eliminate the possibility of orphan wells would be tantamount to a prohibition on development” of Osage oil, the agency wrote to NPR last year.

But many advocates are hopeful that states and the federal government could make real progress. Peltz starts rattling off things that could help: Government regulators could require companies to put up more money in the form of surety bonds that will help cover plugging costs if they go bankrupt. Or make it harder for companies to keep non-producing wells open for years at a time. Or collect more money from the oil industry as a whole to cover orphan well plugging costs, rather than relying on taxpayers to foot the bill.

Many states, he says, are working on approaches like this, to hold the industry accountable for the cost of closing wells and avoid creating more orphans. He points to recent changes in Texas and Oklahoma as examples. “There is no justification for orphaning wells,” he says.

Despite challenges, the map is getting filled in

A few years ago Mary Kang, of McGill University, tracked a 50% increase in how many wells had been documented in the U.S. over just six months. She attributes the increase to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which passed in 2021 and included $4.7 billion in funding for plugging those orphan wells — both creating an incentive for states to map them, and providing resources for the effort.

Before using funds to plug wells, “the states had to submit the numbers of orphan wells that they have in their state,” she says. “So that increase has a lot to do with states actually taking the time and effort … to document wells that they know of or improving their databases.”

The well-plugging program was launched under the Biden administration. Some of that funding is currently frozen, but the Department of the Interior tells NPR via email that it is currently reviewing state applications for some grant funding and plans to open others after a policy review. In the meantime, more than a billion dollars have already been awarded.

That federal money has already been transformative. But how far will $4.7 billion go toward actually plugging wells?

“Oh, it’s not enough,” Kang says, immediately.

That’s because once they’re found, fixing them is pricey. They have to be examined, cleaned up and carefully filled with cement. “I have spent as low as $20,000 and as high as $300,000,” says Everett Waller, the former chair of the Osage Minerals Council.

Before the current federal funding existed, Waller led an effort to plug orphan wells on the tribe’s land. At the time, the tribe knew of about 1,600. With a budget of $19 million, Waller managed to plug just 85.

That’s a microcosm of the trend nationwide. Every attempt to plug orphan wells has been dwarfed by the size of the problem.

But Waller, who says he’s the only chairman of the Osage Minerals Council who saw more wells plugged than drilled on tribal lands, says that giving up is not an option.

“I don’t want my children to have to live through things that I can fix,” he says.