Capping abandoned oil, gas wells is good

The next great environmental cleanup in Pennsylvania may be at hand.

Some of these “orphan” wells are leaking methane and are considered a top environmental concern.

Bills percolating in the U.S. House and Senate would, if passed, direct billions of dollars to capping abandoned oil and gas wells around the country. Some of these “orphan” wells, abandoned when drilling companies stop operating, are leaking methane. They are a top environmental concern.

In addition to the House and Senate bills, President Joe Biden has included $16 billion in funding in his $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan for reclaiming orphan wells around the country and cementing them shut.

Capping these wells is a winwin proposition, a rare point of agreement between the oil and gas industry and environmental activists and between Democrats and Republicans. Legislators should move swiftly to infuse efforts to close them with the necessary capital to push the process forward.

Estimates vary on how many uncapped wells exist in the state. Some place the number at about 200,000. To cap them all could cost in excess of $6 billion. Efforts to cap these wells have been woefully underfunded, which has led to a system of prioritization: The worst wells are capped first while many are left open. Indefinitely.

The appeal to oil and gas companies is apparent. As drilling declines, these companies have been vocal about their willingness to contribute the manpower and know-how to capping abandoned wells. Providing them the funding to do so could preserve their jobs as the nation continues its move away from fossil fuels toward other sources of energy. Legislators should move swiftly to disburse funding that will allow this industry to begin bidding projects and putting Pennsylvanians to work cleaning up their state. This is a green initiative that delivers on promises to preserve jobs.

Environmental activists are in favor obvious reasons, too. Many of these orphan wells leak the greenhouse gas methane.

The abandoned wells represent an opportunity for lawmakers, activists and businesses to come together to fix a problem that needs fixing and has needed it for years. The House and Senate bills don’t stop at merely providing funding for capping, but they strengthen regulations to prevent additional wells from being abandoned, treating the problem at its source. The wellcapping industry is poised for a cash infusion. All that remains is for lawmakers to uncap the spigot.

Stormwater management

Many local counties do not have comprehensive and connected stormwater management plans. Instead, local governments have an uncoordinated patchwork of different systems, or none, even though water is a common problem because it does not respect political boundaries.

Regardless of one town’s preparedness, a failure upstream in a different town can be catastrophic.

Locally, stormwater management became controversial five years ago when Scranton’s government sold the sanitary sewer system to Pennsylvania American Water. Even though it did not have a formal policy or specific contract to do so, the Scranton Sewer Authority used to maintain major components of the city’s stormwater collection system. The company did not assume that responsibility when it bought the sanitary sewer system, leaving the city government with a still-unresolved question of how to do the job.

But that just involves maintenance of an existing system that often is inadequate to the task. The true resolution is in development of a countywide or even regionwide system that not only maintains existing stormwater infrastructure, but studies stormwater regionwide and deploys modern methods to diminish the amount of stormwater that must be controlled.

Developing containment areas, porous vehicle parking areas that absorb rainwater rather than funnel it into a torrent, public and private water gardens, and other methods to better handle water and other low-cost but innovative projects collectively could make a huge difference.

Lackawanna County should form a stormwater management authority. Opponents of such operations lament that, yes, they impose fees to cover improvements. But so does nature, in the costs of recovering from catastrophe, after catastrophe, after catastrophe.