The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) regulates oil and gas development in Pennsylvania. DEP shoulders the burden of regulating energy development and protecting the Commonwealth’s intrinsic rights to clean air, water, and the environment. With that contextualized, we will break down some of the recent funding and programs DEP has created and why they are poor examples of cleanup efforts in the oil and gas sector.
The Department of the Interior has allocated $76.4 million from President Biden’s Investing in America agenda to address the critical issue of Pennsylvania’s orphaned oil and gas wells. This significant funding is part of a national effort to tackle the environmental risks associated with these abandoned wells.
Orphaned Well Plugging Grant (OWPG)
Pennsylvania has created the Orphaned Well Plugging Grant program in response to the funding. Orphaned wells, remnants from an earlier era of oil and gas extraction. They leak methane, a potent greenhouse gas that exacerbates climate change by trapping heat much more effectively than carbon dioxide. The funding for Pennsylvania aims to plug approximately 550 of these wells over the next five years, leading to a substantial reduction in methane emissions and improved emissions. Pennsylvania’s total number of orphaned wells range from 200,000 to 700,000.
Methane Emission Reduction Program (MERP)
In response to the federal Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which provides new authorities under Section 136 of the Clean Air Act to reduce methane emissions from the petroleum and natural gas sector, DEP is creating a Methane Emissions Reduction Program (MERP) Grant that provides funding to an applicant to plug an eligible Marginal Conventional Well (MCW).
Marginal Conventional Wells are low-producing wells that often have disproportionately high methane emissions. These are older wells that can no longer produce large volumes of oil or gas. In addition, marginal conventional wells that are idle or permanently inactive are at high risk of being improperly abandoned and falling into the category of “orphaned wells.”
Both programs are solutions to issues from years of oil and gas development:
- The regulatory undersight of wells being drilled without bonding requirements.
- The mismanagement of assets by companies that go bankrupt and abandon wells in the process.
- The lack of scientific understanding of how to properly deal with the emissions from this industry.
These burdens must be corrected, and DEP’s solution is to use the funding from the IRA and BIL legislation. The issue with these programs is that federal money is set aside for the states and, in this case, the Commonwealth’s residents to benefit the Commonwealth. Still, the money is being used as a subsidy for the oil and gas industry.
If taxpayer money is being put aside to address and reverse the levels of methane emitted by the oil and gas industry, but it is the oil and gas industry operators who are receiving this money to plug the wells, then it is a poor investment. The operators are responsible for plugging these wells and finishing the job, not the Commonwealth. That funding went to the individuals who will continue drilling wells, releasing methane, and perpetuating the problem this money was set aside to address. The biggest issue with these programs is that they are not addressing the source of the pollution: our reliance on fossil fuels. The incentives to remove these pollutants and attempt to tackle the growing instability in earth systems should not go to the industry that has caused it and actively deny the change needed to fix the issue.
It is incredibly short-sighted of DEP to take taxpayer money set aside to create relief from climate change – from the recurring 100-year storms and unprecedented weather events – and turn it back to the industry that refuses to even acknowledge the problem. Good, honest business is when you acknowledge the impacts of your profession and take responsibility. If I run a construction company and create buildings, “finish” my job, but never clean up the materials around the site, I run a bad business. When the oil and gas industry does it, the Commonwealth makes “agreements” with them and has the taxpayers pay for the cleanup.
