Pennsylvania to Receive $104 Million in Funding for Much-Needed Cleanup of Orphaned Oil and Gas Wells

Washington, DC – The Department of the Interior announced today that it would distribute $1.15 billion in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for states, including Pennsylvania, that will clean up inactive oil and gas wells on federal land. Pennsylvania will receive $104 million to plug the commonwealth’s wells to address environmental, health, and safety concerns. 

Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PA DEP) has tracked just over 8,200 orphaned and abandoned wells, but studies estimate that there are more than 200,000 orphaned wells in the Commonwealth. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provides crucial support to help the state recover from it’s massive well backlog  and financial mismanagement by oil and gas companies, but state officials must go further to protect the state going forward.

Recently, the Pennsylvania Environmental Quality Board voted to move forward petitions filed by the Sierra Club, Clean Air Council, Earthworks, Mountain Watershed Association, PennFuture, and Protect Penn-Trafford that would work to adopt better bonding for conventional and unconventional wells on state lands. 

In Pennsylvania, the required bond amounts for oil and gas wells — the amount of money drillers have to set aside before drilling a well to cover the costs of its eventual clean up — are woefully inadequate to cover the costs of cleaning up a well site. In many cases, the cost of cleanup falls on the taxpayers and not the oil and gas companies doing the drilling and polluting in Pennsylvania.

The next Environmental Quality Board meeting is scheduled for February 15, 2022 at 9 AM ET where petitioners should receive an update on their proposed rulemaking petitions. 

In response, Sierra Club Senior Campaign Representative Kelsey Krepps issued the following statement: “What must accompany this vital funding is bonding reform to ensure that oil and gas companies are paying for their own well plugging and enforcement of closure requirements to assure owners are not just leaving leaking wells behind at taxpayer expense. At both the federal level and state level, our bonding structures are lacking. Without bonding reform, we’ll continue to see wells sit unplugged and added to our backlogs. With our state rulemaking petitions, we’re seeking to address this issue now and into the future and the Pennsylvania DEP should work to produce reports on those petitions in a timely manner to fully address this critical state issue."