PA Environment Digest Blog: Guest Essay: Stop Giving Handouts To Natural Gas Industry, Make Them Clean Up Their Own Messes And Protect Public Health

By Mitchell Hescox, Evangelical Environmental Network; Jacquelyn Omotalade, Environmental Health Project; Melissa Ostroff, MPH, Earthworks

This guest essay first appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on November 11, 2022--

With Gov. Tom Wolf and the legislature having passed a giant tax break to incentivize massive chemical plants that will require more methane-producing gas wells to provide raw material, Pennsylvanians face the urgent need to defend our children from the harmful health impacts of legacy fossil fuel pollution as well as increased pollution to come.

Pennsylvania’s forests, parks, private lands, and playgrounds are littered with an estimated 200,000 to 600,000 abandoned and unplugged oil or gas wells, and the industry keeps walking away from more.

Only Texas has more of these derelict wells.

It would be great if we could rely on the industry to clean up its own mess, but too often we can’t.

According to its Oil and Gas Program Compliance Database, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) issued 315 Notices of Violation (NOV) just for the first three-quarters of 2022. [Read more here.]

In only the first nine months of 2022, at the average plugging cost of $68,000 per well plugged, that adds up to around $21.4 million dollars paid not by the companies that abandoned them, but by you, the Pennsylvania taxpayer.

Adding insult to injury, our Republican-led General Assembly held up budget negotiations earlier this year until they got more handouts for the oil and gas industry.

These included ridiculous limits for well bonding—how much money companies pay up front to ensure the land where they drill is later restored—that were hidden away in the final budget.

Instead of holding industry to a fair and just bond to ensure these operators do the right thing, the friends of the industry in the General Assembly set the maximum bond at $2,500 per well.

That’s only 3.6% of the average cost of fixing the wells.

Most egregiously, the legislature prohibited Commonwealth agencies from raising bonds for 10 years and exempted owners from paying bonds for pre-1985 wells (the majority of wells in Pennsylvania and the ones most likely to leak methane). [Read more here.]

According to data compiled by the Ohio Valley River Institute, abandoned well leaks represent 5-8% of Pennsylvania’s total human-caused methane leaks—between 40,000 and 70,000 metric tons/year or enough to power 40,000 to 70,000 homes each year.

As the rest of us are paying more for everything, thanks to inflation, the immorality of also picking up the check for the messes made by the oil and gas industry is obscene.

But more than the cost to clean up the oil and gas industry’s messes, what troubles us most is the price our kids and all of us pay for the damages to our health and lives.

Leaking methane is a powerful greenhouse gas 86 times more potent than CO2 in its first twenty years in the atmosphere.

Methane, from all sources, causes at least one-quarter of the warming we are experiencing today. Warmer temperatures produce more smog, increase asthma, and force earlier springs and later falls, increasing cases of Lyme disease that threaten all Pennsylvanians.

Methane is not only released into the air from unplugged wells but can also dissolve into groundwater and change into foul-smelling hydrogen sulfide gas (rotten egg smell).

Foul odor is minor, however, compared to the 55 water supplies (as of 2015) across Pennsylvania that have been impacted by other toxics and pollutants associated with abandoned wells, such as barium, chloride, volatile organic compounds, and benzene and arsenic (both known carcinogens) that have poured into our wells, streams, and rivers throughout our Commonwealth.

Unplugged oil and gas wells are an imminent threat to both our wallets and our children’s health.

As predicted back in July and with thanks to the friends of oil and gas in our General Assembly, it’s only getting worse.

Our kids and all Pennsylvanians deserve more from our legislature than more gas industry handouts. Pennsylvania’s government must ensure public safety by making industry clean up its existing messes and preventing future ones.

If all of us can overcome our differences and work together for the sake of our kids and grandchildren, shouldn’t the General Assembly do so too?

Mitchell Hescox is the president of the Evangelical Environmental Network; Jacquelyn Omotalade, JD, Public Policy Manager, Environmental Health Project; Melissa Ostroff, MPH - Pennsylvania Field Advocate, Earthworks

NewsClips - Don’t Subsidize Natural Gas Pollution:

-- Gov. Wolf Signs Massive, 20-Year Taxpayer Subsidies Into Law For Natural Gas, Hydrogen And Petrochemical Industries With No Public Accountability Or Environmental Safeguards [PaEN]

-- Guest Essay: Our Leaders Need To Stop Negotiating With The Fossil-Fuel Industry Behind Closed Doors And Protect Public Health And Our Children - By Lois Bower-Bjornson, Clean Air Council and Washington County Resident [PaEN]

-- Republican Herald Editorial: State Lawmakers Should Adopt Rules That Preclude State Taxpayers From Subsidizing Pollution From Oil & Gas Industry [PaEN]

-- York Dispatch Editorial: Energy Companies Are Reporting Record Profits, PA Lawmakers Don’t Need To Give Them More Tax Breaks [PaEN]

-- Citizens Voice Editorial: Subsidizing Pollution - Taxpayers Pay $1.7 Billion To Subsidize Shell Ethane Plant In Beaver County

-- TribLive Editorial: State Fines Should Be Higher Than Tax Cuts To Penalize Environmental Leaks [PaEN]

-- Scranton Times/Republican Herald Editorial: Legislators Like Plastics, Expect More [PaEN]

-- Republican Herald Editorial: Dangerous Course For Oil & Gas Well Emissions, Obstructionists Should Get Out Of The Way [PaEN]

-- Citizens Voice Editorial: State Insists On Paying Polluters [PaEN]

-- PennLive Guest Essay: Tax Credit Bill Gifts Natural Gas, Dirty Hydrogen With $4 Billion In Taxpayer Subsidies - By Patrick McDonnell, PennFuture