When Curtis Shuck learned that the oil and gas industry had left orphaned wells all over the US, he made it his mission to cap as many as he could.
What started out as the epiphany of one hard-charging man has since led to the capping of 45 wells in 14 states.
An unbelievable 3.7 million abandoned oil and gas wells litter the country and belch more than 300 kilotons of methane or 8.2 million metric tons of CO2e every year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. More than half of these wells (58 percent) are unplugged and at least 126,000 wells are “orphaned,” meaning regulators can no longer find a company or owner to hold accountable. Maybe the oil company went out of business or bankrupt — and landowners and communities are frequently left with the destruction after oil producers have moved on. Often records have gone missing, and nobody even knows where all the old wells are located. “That number just keeps increasing exponentially as oil companies go out of business,” Shuck adds.
About 10 percent of the abandoned wells emit large amounts of methane, (…)
He plugged the first well in 2020 “out of our piggy bank, with my and my wife’s savings.” To this day, he does not draw a salary from Well Done. While still working as a consultant for transportation logistics, he says, “plugging oil wells is my side hustle that takes 90 percent of my time.”
There should be a levy imposed on the whole industry to go into a fund to cap historic wells
That sounds like a very doable fix. The understanding I got from the article is that even for relevant state laws,
“There’s been a tremendous amount of industry pushback against these reforms because their business model for decades has been to avoid plugging these wells, and the huge cost is currently being externalized to the public,”
And also it looks like
Exxon makes $40 billion a year in profit,” Peltz points out. “Exxon alone could plug half the wells in the United States with its profits if it wanted.
Is that saying it’d cost $80B to cap all the unused wells? That seems really high. I wonder why it costs so much.
Each well is different, but capping most abandoned wells requires pouring thousands of pounds of cement down the hole to keep the gas down. While the average cost is around $75,000, the worst well, a “super-emitter,” as Shuck put it, cost him more than $375,000 because he first had to clean out the failing old infrastructure before he could start capping.