All across the country right now, there are tens of thousands of officially documented \u201corphan\u201d oil and gas wells creating environmental hazards for their communities. These are wells that the oil and gas industry walked away from because they became uneconomic over time. Rather than properly sealing them, they left state and federal taxpayers holding the bag. These wells can be big sources of air, water and climate pollution if left unaddressed.<\/p>\n
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions more of these inactive, unplugged wells that need to be addressed. This is not to mention the potential for adding hundreds of thousands of currently active wells to the orphan well inventory as oil and gas producers struggle to survive the downturn in petroleum prices.<\/p>\n
Luckily, efforts are underway in Congress and within the presidential transition plan to address these orphan wells. In his economic plan, President-elect Joe Biden laid out his vision for a cleaner and healthier future.<\/p>\n
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When Biden takes over the presidency in January, his top priority will be to rebuild and rethink our economy, including investing in clean energy solutions and plugging and remediating abandoned and orphaned wells across the country. These wells have long been deserted and no longer produce oil and gas, yet they still emit methane, pollute our groundwater and pose a risk to public health. Both of these policies \u2014 clean energy and orphan well plugging \u2014 are good for the environment and will create hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs. It\u2019s a win-win.<\/p>\nThe connection between jobs and addressing orphan oil and gas wells <\/a><\/span>Share on X<\/a><\/span>\n Biden actively talked on the campaign trail about the good-paying jobs these commonsense policies will create. While clean energy is a common theme that the Biden-Harris campaign highlighted on the trial, orphaned wells got the spotlight in prime time at the ABC town hall<\/a> on October 15th. At that town hall, Biden noted that \u201cthere are well over 100,000 wells that are left uncapped\u201d in the Pennsylvania region alone. And he would create jobs, saying, \u201cWe could hire 128,000 of these people who are working in the industry to cap these wells and get a good salary doing it now.\u201d<\/p>\n But these wells aren\u2019t just in Pennsylvania. There are over 57,000 documented orphan wells in addition to hundreds of thousands of undocumented orphan wells across the country. Twelve states have over 1,000 documented orphan wells each \u2014 California, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming \u2014 and federal funding for cleanup of these orphan wells would inject tens to hundreds of millions of dollars directly into each of these states\u2019 economies.<\/p>\n The President-elect is right, plugging these wells gives us the opportunity to create new jobs in the middle of a pandemic, particularly for out-of-work oilfield workers. All of this could lead to 120,000 to 500,000 good-paying jobs, according to a paper<\/a> published in the Columbia University\u2019s Center on Global Energy Policy. In fact, the Biden-Harris transition plan includes a proposal<\/a> to create \u201c250,000 jobs plugging abandoned oil and natural gas wells and reclaiming abandoned coal, hard rock and uranium mines.\u201d<\/p>\n