This article by Grist is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
An estimated 880,000 abandoned oil and gas wells dot the United States. These orphaned wells, some of which were deserted as long as a century ago, can leak toxic oil and gas into the groundwater and air. They also emit methane, the planet-warming primary component of natural gas. In 2021, Congress appropriated $4.7 billion to help clean up the mess by giving states the money they need to seal the wells and remediate their surroundings. Over the last two years, the federal Department of Interior has doled out nearly $1 billion of this total. As of March, more than 7,700 wells have been remediated as a result.
But with hundreds of thousands of orphaned wells still to go, the road ahead is rocky, in part because states are struggling to meet the Interior Department’s requirements for receiving the remaining funding. The federal agency awarded an initial $25 million each to roughly 30 states with few strings attached. To receive funding from the next tranche, however, the agency has required that states demonstrate that their remediation efforts meet standards outlined in the Endangered Species Act and the National Historic Preservation Act. As a result, state oil and gas departments, which have little to no experience navigating such requirements, are hiring additional staff and creating new procedures to ensure that, as they clean up thousands of decrepit and leaky oil wells across the nation, they also protect endangered species and cultural sites. The early results of these added requirements show that the pace of cleanup is slowing: Texas, for example, plugged 60 percent fewer wells during the first five months of receiving a recent round of federal funding compared to the period following an earlier grant that did not include these requirements.
“Each tranche seems to get a little harder, a little higher cost, a little more complexity, a greater burden,” said Dennis Hatfield, Kentucky’s oil and gas division director. “We want to plug them all, but if they [federal officials] make it hard enough, states are going to struggle to meet that standard.”
It’s supposed to be oil and gas companies, rather than state officials like Hatfield, who are responsible for cleaning up well sites. But when companies go bankrupt or otherwise disappear, the responsibility falls to states, tribes, and the federal government. When Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, it included three rounds of grants to help clear the growing backlog of orphan wells. The initial grant of up to $25 million per state was intended to put plugging companies back to work at a time when oil prices were low and the industry was in free fall. Most states have already used that funding, and they’ve reported the amount of avoided methane emissions as a result. (In a report to Congress late last year, the Interior Department noted that regulators in California, Colorado, Louisiana, and New Mexico had plugged 328 of roughly 500 orphan wells that were emitting the equivalent of approximately 11,500 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year.)
“There was a slightly different goal with each bucket,” said Adam Peltz, a director and senior attorney at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. “But a unifying goal was to facilitate the plugging of wells.”
The Interior Department is mandating that states conduct assessments of every well site where reclamation work is planned and submit lengthy reports confirming that the cleanup will not further imperil endangered species or damage cultural sites. That has meant hiring biologists to evaluate the reclamation plan for every one of potentially hundreds of well sites to determine if remediation work might have an adverse effect on an endangered species. States are also required to contact tribes that currently have a presence in the vicinity of well cleanup, as well as those with a historical connection to the region, in order to comply with the National Historic Preservation Act. The process has stumped state regulators who don’t have an easy way to identify the appropriate tribes or contact them.
There’s also the added irony that these preservation laws, which date back to the 1960s and 1970s, in many cases did nothing to protect these sites from drilling in the first place, but they are now standing in the way of returning the lands to something like their earlier conditions.
“There could be some Earth-moving going on, but it’s also the case that there was Earth-moving going on in the first place,” explained Peltz. “There’s questions of whether there could really be anything of historical value, given that these are already sites being returned to their previous state.”
States have spent recent months designing processes to meet these requirements. In Michigan, the state’s Oil, Gas, and Minerals Division is hiring an archaeological firm to help assess whether cleanups will disturb cultural sites. In North Dakota, which has wetlands that migratory fowl depend on, the state is putting together a plan to ensure that reclamation work doesn’t affect the whooping crane and other endangered species.
“There’s a lot of unknowns due to the fact that we haven’t done it yet,” said David Tabor, a field supervisor with North Dakota’s Department of Mineral Resources. Tabor said that scheduling reclamation work was proving to be particularly “challenging” because of the state’s harsh winters and the fact that migratory fowl move through the state in the spring.
“We only have three to four months when we can actually do reclamation work,” he said.
Most state oil and gas departments have not had to navigate federal historic preservation and endangered species laws previously. Unlike state transportation departments, which oversee the construction of major roadways, environmental and minerals divisions regulate the oil and gas industry but have not managed the kind of major construction projects that typically require federal environmental clearance.
“There are going to be some lessons learned,” said Dylan Fuge, Deputy Secretary of New Mexico’s Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department. “We had some growing pains.”
Giovanni Rocco, a spokesperson for the Interior Department, said that it’s because of requirements written into the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that activities “with the potential to affect historic properties” are subject to review under the National Historic Preservation Act. Similarly, a section of the Endangered Species Act requires that orphan well cleanups do not jeopardize endangered species or have an adverse effect on critical habitats.
Even as states navigate the requirements of the formula grants, they’re beginning to look ahead to the performance grants. Congress set aside $1.5 billion for two types of performance grants: matching grants and regulatory improvements grants. The former is intended to incentivize state legislatures to find additional funds for cleanup, and the latter is contingent on states improving their orphan well policies to prevent wells from becoming abandoned in the first place. Late last year, the Interior Department accepted public comments on how it should assess whether states will qualify for regulatory improvement grants. The law notes that states need to demonstrate that they either strengthened well-plugging standards or else introduced policy reforms that would reduce the number of wells that are likely to be orphaned in the future. But since the law doesn’t explicitly lay out how states should demonstrate compliance with those provisions, the Interior Department requested comments on how it should assess the effectiveness of the regulatory programs.
Across the board, states asked for flexibility. The Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, or IOGCC, a quasi-governmental body created by Congress that represents oil- and gas-producing states, noted that the types of improvements that will best serve a state will vary depending on the geology, climate, and nature of oil and gas operations. Every state also has a different regulatory program, which makes a one-size-fits-all approach difficult to implement, according to the commenters.
“Nothing gives [the Interior Department] authority to dictate what improvements a state must make to qualify for a regulatory improvement grant,” the executive director of the IOGCC wrote in the public comments.