Thanks to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and new legislation spearheaded by U.S. Rep. Summer Lee, the federal government is making an unprecedented investment in finding and capping the more than 200,000 idle oil and gas wells in Pennsylvania.

These funds and research will be essential to cleaning up legacy fossil fuel infrastructure that, in many cases, continues to leak climate-warming methane into the atmosphere.

But federal money does not resolve the question of who, exactly, is responsible for many of the old wells that dot the Pennsylvania landscape. It is clear that orphaned wells — for which no owner can be found — are the responsibility of the commonwealth, and that wells drilled and abandoned by their current owners are the responsibility of those owners. But what about wells on land owned by a someone other than the original driller, which in many cases is a long-defunct entity?

Pennsylvania considers those wells to be the responsibility of the current owner. Those owners — usually oil and gas companies that took on the land and infrastructure as part of acquiring the company that drilled and abandoned the wells long ago — think the state should pick up the tab.

A compromise is possible: The state can pitch in a small amount — say, up to a quarter of the cost of capping, which runs about $33,000 per well — to help companies clean up inherited infrastructure.

The state has the stronger argument. When a current oil and gas company purchases the holdings of a competitor, the enlarged firm assumes all the liabilities as well — including cleaning up messes the original company left behind. It doesn’t make sense for the acquiring firm to get the benefits of land and mineral rights, while passing off the costs associated with that property to the taxpayers.

At the same time, the ongoing costs of uncapped wells — in terms of the leakage of oil and gas as well as gases like methane and benzene — are public in nature. In other words, the companies don’t just inherit a private financial albatross, but a public threat to health and the environment. And since so many wells are unmapped, companies often find previously unknown wells on their property, and getting to them all can be prohibitively expensive

This adds up to a compelling public policy argument for modestly subsidizing the cost of remediating old wells, in those cases where they were not drilled, used or abandoned by their current owners.

Further, Lee’s bill will help with this problem by directing $156 million to the Department of Energy to study how to find abandoned wells and how to determine the risks they pose. This will help capping programs, whether public or private, move forward efficiently and prioritize effectively.

Altogether, the attention of the state and federal governments on the problem of abandoned wells is welcome, and long overdue. The top priority must be capping the most dangerous wells as soon as possible.

— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via TNS