They are orphans because the people who profited from them left it for the rest of us to be responsible and close them. It looks like even $4.7 Billion won’t be enough to plug the orphans.

Potential Opportunities and Risks of Orphaned Wells | PSE | Physicians, Scientists, and Engineers for Healthy Energy

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Lest you be lulled into thinking that energy companies have seen the light and turned over a new leaf, this was just published by Spotlight PA:

A new report by Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection says conventional oil and gas drillers improperly abandoned thousands of additional wells here between 2017 and 2021 — often with impunity.

Abandoned wells leak the greenhouse gas methane, which contributes to climate change, and drillers are required to report and plug them. 

Otherwise it falls to the state, “the plugger of last resort,” which already has an estimated 200,000 wells to close at an average cost of $30,000 a piece.

“The industry’s recent record of compliance is troubling and requires DEP’s Office of Oil and Gas Management to explore new techniques for deterring violations and encouraging compliance,” the report says. 

Read more (click here)

My childhood was shadowed by asthma and frequent bronchitis. We lived in Cleveland where open hearth furnaces and coke plants tainted the air with soot and corrosive sulphur. There is a reason that it is called “the rust belt.”

But the friendly ol’ gas stove we cooked on may have contributed. Read more below.

Stoves

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is weighing action on the indoor air pollution caused by gas-powered stoves. Such appliances are in use in 40 percent of homes in the U.S. and emit nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and fine particulate matter at levels that the EPA has linked to respiratory illness. The data is particularly worrisome when it comes to kids and air pollutants from stoves: A new study published last month in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that over 12 percent of childhood asthma cases in the United States could be attributed to the usage of gas stoves.

Ari Natter, Bloomberg via NumLock News

The US has a huge investment in natural gas infrastructure. We would like to think of gas as the most benign of the fossil fuels — you can burn it in your unvented kitchen or an unvented fireplace. But now we suspect there is a grim hidden cost. It’s hurting our kids.

Can we find ways to leave natural gas in the ground? For the sake of our children and our planet?

You have integrity when what you do matches what you say and vice-versa.

It comes as no surprise that the energy industry has been called out yet again for misleading the public. They aren’t walking their talk, and we should ignore what they say and watch what they do.

A parenthetical note: the Keystone Pipeline had another big leak of about half a million gallons, proving once again that pipelines are dangerous and that we can’t rely on the industry to engineer or manage them to be accident-free. There will always be significant and unavoidable risks that those along the pipeline are exposed to so that the rest of us can have cheap and abundant fossil fuels.

Another observation: OPEC is supporting the price of oil by limiting production, while the US is buying oil when the price of crude dips to replenish reserves previously released to reduce the price at the pump. This has the effect of a subsidy or price support. These actions stabilize the price at the current levels.

We need to subsidize clean energy to encourage the development of alternatives. One wonders what would accelerate the development of fusion energy. Tomorrow scientists are expected to announce that a controlled nuclear fusion reaction produced more energy than it took to start it. That’s a first and a milestone. But practical fusion power generation is still decades away.

Even so, there is a convergence of new energy sources: wind, solar, and, eventually, fusion. We must focus on leaving carbon fuels in the ground, they are destroying us. The money they represent is corrupting our energy priorities. Good energy policy can’t be built on self-serving disinformation.

Investigative journalist Judd Legum zeroed in on Chevron for posing as a cutting-edge innovator in renewable energy when the opposite appears to be so. The energy industry has a deeply flawed record, and much of what they claim is helping the environment actually does more harm than good.

This is about integrity. When you walk your talk, you have integrity, when you pose and obfuscate, you don’t.

Read for yourself . . .

For years we have pointed to the residents’ of Dimock, PA experience as evidence of the damage caused by fracking. Now, after fourteen years, residents have hopes that their homes will enjoy good water. It took a dramatic and controversial documentary film and aggressive litigation against a recalcitrant company. I hesitate to say that anybody “won” in this process. The sixteen-million-dollar water system will deliver potable water that residents once drew from their wells. That doesn’t make up for the years of hauling water, the compromised property values, and the disruption of community life.

It looks like the executives of the oil company that caused all the problems have not been held accountable. The company has a new name and is posing as reformed. But Dimock remains scarred and damaged by fracking. Nothing in the legal victory can restore the lost time or cure the disruption. As we often point out, fracking does nothing to improve the environment, and the “mailbox money” and temporary employment the industry generates for locals do not offset the harm.

Let Pennsylvania citizens continue to resist the efforts of the gas and oil industry. The industry still seeks to pipe Pennsylvania gas to terminals for liquefication and shipment offshore, where it will be burned or made into polluting “disposable” single-use plastic products. Read the WHYY story below (click picture).

We’d like to think that science is impartial, but money talks.

Greenwashing

A new study analyzed 1,168,194 sentences within 1,706 academic reports from 26 university energy research centers, three of which got their funding primarily from the natural gas industry. The study found that the three university energy research centers that were funded primarily by fossil fuel interests were more favorable to natural gas in their work than they were to renewable energy, while the effect was reversed at the centers that were less reliant on funding from fossil fuel interests

Maria Sharmina, Nature Climate Change and Douglas Almond, Xinming Du and Anna Papp, Nature Climate Change

Source: NumLock News

Those that enjoyed the bounty of income literally pumped out of the ground have left tens of thousands of defunct wells for society to clean up. Once you punch a hole down into fossil fuel rich strata, you have created a channel for the nasty stuff to travel to higher layers and to the atmosphere. So old wells cause pollution long after they are no longer economically productive.

Since it’s expensively inconvenient to plug them, they now litter the landscape and belch toxins.

Looks like the regulators and responsible party are dithering, while those whose wells were contaminated tough it out. One more example of the emptiness of claims that fracking can be done safely.

WATER WAIT: Months after a frack out at a gas well in Greene County, residents in one community are still dependent on bottled water, some having to drive across the West Virginia border to find enough of it for their families, per PublicSource. The gas driller, EQT, and the state are still investigating, while testing by a Duquesne University professor found signs of significant water well contamination.

Spotlight PA, 10/19/22