$343M ON WAY TO PLUG OLD WELLS

WASHINGTON — Texas is poised to receive more than $343 million — a larger amount than any other state — as the Biden administration begins doling out federal funding to clean up abandoned oil and gas wells.

It’s part of a first-ever federal effort, funded by the infrastructure package that Congress passed last year, to plug the hundreds of thousands of orphaned wells in the United States and clean up contamination of surrounding lands. The White House says the $4.7 billion program will create thousands of jobs while addressing a growing environmental threat.

“Never before has this country taken on a cleanup effort like this,” said White House infrastructure coordinator Mitch Landrieu.

He said the wells are “polluting backyards, recreation areas and public spaces across the country.”

It is typically the job of oil and gas companies to plug and clean up old wells, but whether due to financial difficulty or malfeasance, many wells are simply abandoned after they run out of meaningful production. The job then falls to states.

Environmental groups say the wells are a serious danger to human and environmental health, leaking toxic chemicals, contaminating groundwater and emitting millions of tons of methane. Ranchers and landowners in Texas have complained in recent months about decades-old wells springing leaks on their properties, raising concerns about a growing problem in the state.

Texas spends about $20 million plugging about 1,400 wells annually as part of a program going back decades, but there is still a backlog of at least 6,400 wells. And there are more than 100,000 wells in Texas that are currently low- or non-producing and may be orphaned, which Adam Peltz of the Environmental Defense Fund called “some warning flags for the future.”

The federal funding will be especially helpful closing offshore wells, which are much more expensive to plug, often requiring building new platforms to get the job done, Peltz said.

“This money is going to go a long way in Texas toward solving the existing orphan well problem,” he said.

Biden administration officials say they are still trying to get a handle on how widespread the problem is.

Initial reports from states applying for funding through the program indicated there are at least 130,000 wells nationally that need to be plugged.

But officials say there are likely far more, with some estimates putting the total at as many as 2 million. Many wells were drilled long before states kept detailed records of where they were located. The White House says it hopes the new batch of federal funding will help spur state efforts to find those.

“Our guess is, based on the information we have, that the numbers are going to go way up, and they probably are much more ubiquitous than we think they are,” said Landrieu, the former New Orleans mayor.

Texas is slated to receive the most funding in part because it had the largest job losses in the oil and gas industry during the pandemic, said Winnie Stachelberg, infrastructure coordinator at the U.S. Department of the Interior. The state lost some 60,000 oil exploration and production jobs in 2020.

“It really is a transformative investment,” said U.S. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, a Houston Democrat who led the effort to include the program in the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package.

Fletcher pointed to estimates from Columbia University researchers that such a program could create 120,000 jobs.

“The funding announced this week,” Fletcher said, “will really provide incredible opportunities to get our skilled oil and gas workforce back to work.” ben.wermund@chron.com