orphan wells

Higher bonding amounts and an expanded orphaned well program will fund the cleanup of thousands of aging sites.

The US government has made more than $1 billion available to qualified states. The program is part of the recently passed infrastructure law.

The impact of orphan wells, both on the environment and on tightening budgets, is a growing concern in the industry. Boom times result in a vast uptick in wells drilled. In bust times, when companies disappear, the liability outlook for these probes gets murky and federal and state governments start looking for answers.

It is estimated there may be a few hundred thousand abandoned wells in Pennsylvania—some located in the woods, along riverbanks, in people's yards, and even inside their homes.

Ranchers and regulators are contending with uncontrolled leaks from thousands of abandoned oil and gas sites that could render some land “functionally uninhabitable.”

Airborne drones with magnetometers have worked well in trials and are ready for more widespread use, potentially revealing thousands of previously unknown wells.

Plugging and cleaning up the open oil and gas wells in Texas could cost companies and taxpayers as much as $117 billion, according to a new report.

Just one orphaned site in California could have emitted more than 30 tons of methane. There are millions more like it.

New research released by Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy and Resources for the Future estimates that a federal program to plug roughly half a million abandoned and so-called "orphaned" oil and gas wells could create as many as 120,000 jobs and reduce pollution.

The COVID-19 disaster and a catastrophic fall in oil prices could leave the state on the hook for billions in environmental cleanup costs if oil and gas companies go bankrupt during the health crisis, New Mexico's top land official says.