As a child in Bolivia, Mateo de la Rocha told his family that he wanted to work as a garbage collector when he grew up. At the time, mountains of trash were everywhere in his hometown of La Paz. In de la Rocha's eyes, local cleaners were the only ones cleaning up the pollution. “I didn't see anyone else actually doing anything apart from the garbage collectors,” he says.
His family later emigrated to the US, and de la Rocha, now a high school senior in Cary, North Carolina, has found a unique way to clean up pollution. He and two friends recently raised $11,000 to plug an abandoned oil well that was leaking gas near a barn on a horse farm in Ohio. It's an unusual niche cause for a young environmentalist to take on, but it could have a big impact on global climate change.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the United States is dotted with 3.9 million abandoned and aging oil and gas wells. While the reasons for abandonment vary, at least 126,000 are orphaned wells, meaning there are no longer any owners or companies that state regulators can hold accountable. Many of the wells also leak methane, a greenhouse gas that is nearly 30 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere over a 100-year period, and even more powerful in the short term.
The EPA estimates that the abandoned wells will release a total of 303,000 tons of methane in 2022, roughly the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by 23 gas-fired power plants in a year, but this estimate is highly uncertain.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 allocates $4.7 billion to states, tribes and federal agencies to plug orphaned wells, but given the number of orphaned wells and the vast geographic area they cover, these federal funds will likely not be enough.
“This is not a problem that any one entity can solve alone,” said Andrew Gobert, program manager for the Department of Energy's effort to establish best practices for finding unrecorded orphan wells and measuring their contamination. “I think it's going to take collaboration between NGOs, government and industry. It really is an all-hands-on-deck effort.”
Take the initiative
After completing an upper level environmental science class, de la Rocha, 18, said he realized that methane gas from these abandoned wells was an issue where individuals could make a difference. He invited his friends and classmates, Sebastian Ng and Lila Gisondi, to get involved; they called themselves Youth Climate Initiative.
“When Mateo approached me about it and really looked into methane wells and what we could do about it, it was like a switch was really flipped,” said Ng, 17. Previously, she said, she felt like there was nothing she could do about climate change and would only joke about the world ending.
For the 18-year-old Gisondi, talking with a friend about methane-spewing wells brought the issue of climate change from the back of her mind to the forefront. “This was an issue I felt I could actually contribute to,” she said.
Wells that are no longer being used to extract oil or gas are supposed to be sealed with cement in a process called capping or plugging. But many wells are left abandoned, often in disrepair, contaminating groundwater and leaking toxic gases, such as hydrogen sulfide, into the air. They can be extremely dangerous for people living nearby.
Further investigation led the trio to contact the Well Done Foundation, a nonprofit that plugs abandoned wells, founded by oil and gas industry veteran Curtis Shack, who first came across the abandoned well in 2019.
“I'm embarrassed to be in this business. I can't keep doing this,” Shook recalled, when he saw the first well. “This orphan well was everybody's dirty little secret.”
He secured a domain name and nonprofit registration for the Well Done Foundation later that day. Since then, the foundation has inspected more than 1,700 abandoned wells across the country and plugged 44 that were deemed the most problematic.
North Carolina students agreed to sponsor Well No. 45, an abandoned oil well located on a horse ranch near Ohio's Cuyahoga Valley National Park. The well is located next to the ranch's barn and just 100 yards from the landowner's house.
Melissa and Bill Simmons bought the property in 2016 with their two sons, several horses and chickens, after discovering that nearly every piece of land they were considering in the area had old oil or gas wells.
At first, she thought, “Everyone else has one of these, so it must be okay.”
The well on their farm was drilled in 1983 by a now-defunct company called Pine Top.
About a year after they moved, the Simmons family discovered gas was leaking from their well. Their sons could hear the gas hissing while working outside. When it rained and water pooled around the corners of the pump jack, the family could see the gas bubbling through the water. Eventually, they could smell gas in the barn and had to leave the door open for fear the gas would build up and explode.
Simmons contacted the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. She learned state officials were dealing with a lengthy list of orphaned oil wells — more than 20,000 wells have been recorded in Ohio, one of the oldest oil-producing regions in the U.S. — and that her well didn't require immediate action. But after multiple calls, a staff member told her about the Well Done Foundation, saying the nonprofit might be able to help.
The two got in touch in late 2021, more than three years after the Simmons family first noticed the well leaking. Shook visited the farm, confirmed the problem and agreed to take on the project.
Since Youth Climate Initiative joined the effort, they've been slowly raising funds for about three months. One of the most touching donations came from de la Rocha's 10-year-old cousin, who donated all of his birthday money to the effort, a total of $120. The fundraiser was featured in Gen Dread, a popular newsletter that covers the issue of youth climate anxiety.
The students also convinced the Reimer Family Climate Crisis Fund, a small Austin, Texas-based family foundation that had previously donated to Weldon, to match their donation. The $11,000 the students raised will cover about 15 percent of the total cost of the project; Weldon plans to cover the rest through other donations and sponsorships.
Work began this year, and on Thursday contractors began pouring cement to plug the well.
National Issues
The Well Done Foundation hopes to scale this adopt-a-well model nationwide, and the organization has also begun the process of receiving carbon credits through the ACR, formerly known as the American Carbon Registry, which runs a voluntary marketplace where individuals and businesses can buy credits that fund projects aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Research on methane emissions from abandoned or neglected wells is just beginning. In a 2016 study of 138 abandoned wells, the highest emission rate researchers measured was about 150 grams of methane per hour. The average for unplugged wells was about 10 grams per hour.
Shook and his colleagues measured more than 10,000 grams of methane per hour at one point from a well in Ohio.
“The discharge rate is much higher than any well we've measured to date,” said Amy Townsend Small, a professor of environmental science at the University of Cincinnati and lead author of the 2016 study, referring to Weldon's figures.
Shook acknowledged that some of the methane emission rates measured by the Weldon Foundation are unusually high, which has sometimes prompted skepticism, but he attributes that to the fact that they used new equipment and measured so many wells.
“There are lots of ways to test,” says Mary Kang, an assistant professor of civil engineering at McGill University in Montreal and lead author of the first study on methane from abandoned wells, published in 2014. “Nobody does it perfectly.”
Dr Kang added that there are potential problems with issuing carbon credits instead of plugging isolated wells. One is that wells in the same area may be connected underground through fractures in rock formations. Plugging one well may simply allow methane to be released into the atmosphere from another well that isn't plugged.
“It's like whack-a-mole,” she said.
The Biden administration's signature climate change legislation, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, established a new program to provide $4.7 billion in federal grant funding through the Department of the Interior.
“The problem is huge,” Shook said, adding that the new federal funding is “essentially just a down payment. There are a lot of wells and well prices are very high.”
Going forward, the oil and gas industry will have to take responsibility for plugging old wells, said Adam Peltz, an attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund who works on oil and gas issues.
And in fact, the Bureau of Land Management recently increased the amount of funding it requires oil and gas companies to set aside to plug wells before they begin drilling, to avoid even more well abandonment in the future.
But Peltz said the department would “plug by any means necessary” existing orphan wells, especially those built before modern regulations.
With final exams, sports days and prom over, de la Rocha, Ng and Gisondi plan to raise funds this summer to plug a second orphaned well.