When Lucy Hurowitz was finishing her first year of high school, she was having anxiety about climate change and the state of the environment.
“You just feel so helpless in the face of these really big problems,” she said.
Then Hurowitz read an article about kids in North Carolina raising money to plug abandoned oil and gas wells. Companies are supposed to plug wells when they stop producing, but historically many have walked away when they dissolve or go bankrupt.
“I thought it was very interesting because Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania have had lots of issues with abandoned wells and oil production,” Hurowitz said.
Abandoned wells can leak methane, a greenhouse gas, into the air and pollute waterways.
By some estimates, Pennsylvania has more than a half million of them.
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In their sophomore year, Hurowitz and her friends at Pittsburgh Allderdice High School started the Dice Well Done Club to work on the issue. They sold ice cream, held movie nights and ran online fundraisers to support well-plugging projects.
Over the summer, the club was invited to a Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro administration event just outside of Pittsburgh, where the state was plugging its 400th well in three years. It drove home to the students how much an abandoned well can affect people’s lives, Hurowitz said.
“We were just like in this woman’s backyard, and we were surrounded by all these huge trucks,” she said. “And then when they finally took us to see the well, it was just a hole in the ground. We were taking pictures, and we’re like taking pictures of a little concrete hole.”
The high schoolers, now seniors, said in two years they raised $10,000 and received matching funds from the Reimer Family Climate Crisis Fund, and a non-profit organization called the Well Done Foundation, which plugs abandoned oil and gas wells in many states, for a total contribution of $25,000. The money helped plug two wells, one in Armstrong County and one in Erie County.
An oil and gas industry consultant turns to well-plugging
The Well Done Foundation founder and chairman Curtis Shuck said some abandoned oil and gas wells have been around for a long time.
“In fact, the first well we plugged in PA was up in Bradford, and that well actually, come to find out, was drilled in 1880,” he said.
It wasn’t until a century later that Pennsylvania law started requiring well owners and operators to plug their wells. The 1984 Oil and Gas Act requires wells to be plugged within a year of ending production. But before then, many were abandoned, or as the state Department of Environmental Protection calls them “orphaned.”
The DEP has estimated the cost to plug the 27,000 known orphaned wells at about $1.8 billion.
To plug a well, a company clears out the well bore, the hole where oil and gas are extracted from deep underground, and fills it with cement. Then it’s supposed to reclaim the site to match the surrounding environment.
The Foundation said it plugged one well this summer in Lawrence County that cost $125,000. Shuck said it was important to do, especially since it was on the site of an active youth camp where kids were playing.
“It was right next to a stream. It was making oil. There were products that were coming uncontrolled to the surface. And it was an open well bore, so there was no well control at the top,” he said. “It was just a hot mess.”
Shuck said he worked in the oil and gas industry for decades, but switched gears and started the Well Done Foundation in 2019 after working in Montana, another state with many abandoned wells. He could hardly believe the mess and strong odors from those wells on the farm fields he visited.
Shuck said methane, a gas that accelerates climate change, was leaking from them. But at the time global warming wasn’t his first concern.
“It was really like, ‘This is an embarrassment for the industry,’” he said. “And I’m really surprised that nobody had really taken these guys to task over it because it was such a wreck.”
Shuck said the number of orphaned wells can be overwhelming. The U.S. Department of the Interior estimated there are more than three million across the country. The Well Done Foundation has plugged about 130 wells nationwide.
Meanwhile, the problem keeps growing. A state report found thousands of newly-abandoned wells in Pennsylvania.
Federal funding helps Pennsylvania increase well-plugging
Seth Pelepko, Deputy Secretary of the DEP’s Office of Oil and Gas Management, said if the DEP has done “due diligence” to look, but doesn’t find a well owner, “the state has statutory authority to properly plug those wells.”
Pelepko said orphaned wells can be dangerous if they’re not plugged, because there is no operator maintaining them, and the materials they’re made of can degrade over time.
“A well that’s innocuous one day, if it’s not properly maintained, it could become the emergency of tomorrow,” Pelepko said. “It could become a gas migration issue, impact the water supply.”
During the Biden administration, Pennsylvania was in line to receive about $400 million over ten years to plug orphaned oil and gas wells, and the pace of well plugging picked up.
But the Trump administration froze the funds. Gov. Shapiro sued to get the funds back. And the money started flowing again.
Meanwhile, Trump’s Interior Department rewrote the federal guidance for well plugging.
“Some of the changes did allow us to speed up certain aspects of the process,” Pelepko said.
For example, the new guidance for states receiving federal money for well plugging removed a requirement that companies monitor for methane leaks at newly plugged wells. The DEP said it still requires testing and monitoring for methane at newly plugged wells.
Pelepko said the federal funding, including money from additional federal partners, has gotten well-plugging efforts moving.
“When I looked at the data most recently, the pace of plugging is higher than it’s ever been,” he said.
Who should pay to plug a well?
Melissa Ostroff, Pennsylvania Policy and Field Manager for the non-profit group Earthworks, thinks it’s great that students are raising money to help get orphaned wells plugged. But she said the oil and gas industry should pay to clean up its own mess, instead of leaving it for children and taxpayers.
“Students are pooling money for plugging a well when this is a problem created by industry? It does not make any sense to me,” said Ostroff.
Ostroff also worries about a new state law that makes it easier for companies to plug wells.
The law allows a company to deem a well “plugged” if it makes a good-faith effort to find the well bottom, even if it does not reach the actual end of the well. It’s expected to help speed up the process of plugging a well.
Ostroff fears it could lead to a false sense of security for people who live nearby.
“We want wells to be plugged properly because if they’re not, they can continue to leak and they could explode. They could be a real safety hazard,” she said. “Meanwhile, people think the well is plugged, and there’s nothing to be concerned about.”
The Marcellus Shale Coalition, a trade group that represents companies that drill in ‘unconventional’ deep shale formations, said it worked with the Pennsylvania Coal Alliance and the DEP to write the legislation.
“PA regulators retain the authority to ensure that all wells are plugged properly,” said Coalition spokesperson Patrick Henderson. “This was never about easing any standard to plug a well; it was about providing a predictable regulatory pathway.”
While most of orphaned wells were drilled before modern-day fracking, Henderson said today’s drillers have an interest in plugging those that are too close to new drilling sites, because they could interfere with the proper operation of a new well.
“A plugger shouldn’t go broke…trying to… get down to the bottom of this well,” he said. “As long as you’re down below the base of treatable water and to a reasonable…elevation where you’re protecting the environment, you’re protecting the aquifers, then that should be good.”
The DEP says it’s still considering how to implement the new legislation.
How well-plugging is helping young people
For high school student Lucy Hurowitz, raising money to plug wells helps quell her climate and environmental anxiety.
“For me, it’s been a way to kind of face that psychological aspect, and to use doing physical actions that help the environment to also help my own, and maybe hopefully others’ mental health, in the process,” she said.
Hurowitz is thinking about studying psychology when she starts college next year.
