Another Source of Greenhouse Gas: Abandoned Oil Wells

The Sacramento Bee published a video showing dozens of oil tankers anchored off California's coast as the current demand for oil plummets. But looking toward the future, they've also published along with it a special warning from the director of the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity's Climate Law Institute: California Resources Corporation, the state's largest oil and gas producer, is the latest oil producer to seek bankruptcy, aiming to wipe out more than $5 billion in debt and equity interests... This bankrupt company also faces more than $1 billion in costs to properly plug and abandon its 18,700 wells in the state. That problem goes far beyond CRC. A state-commissioned report found that cleaning up California's 107,000 oil and gas wells could cost a staggering $9.2 billion.

Saddling taxpayers with cleanup costs after pocketing the profits would be outrageous, yet many oil producers have done just that, walking away from millions of wells across the U.S. With more bankruptcies coming, the risk that oil companies weasel out of well cleanup keeps increasing... The risks aren't just financial. When wells sit idle, they corrode and leak. Experts point to nearly 75,000 wells in California that are "idle" or near-idle, producing little to no oil, or "orphaned," having no viable or responsible operator... [M]ethane frequently leaked by idle wells is a greenhouse gas that warms the planet 87 times more than the same amount of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Potentially tens of thousands of idle wells are leaking methane into the air, worsening climate change and increasing the risk and magnitude of heat waves and fires like those we're suffering now.

Yet Governor Newsom's administration keeps rewarding this polluting industry, including CRC. This year, state oil regulators have issued more than 1,600 permits for new wells. More than 300 went to CRC. This will only increase cleanup costs once wells stop producing or their owners go bust. Even if the state stopped issuing permits today, plugging and cleaning up existing wells at the current snail's pace will take decades. California can't just keep approving drilling, waiting for this tottering industry to collapse. We need a plan for a managed, just transition.

One solution gives Gov. Newsom a chance to tackle multiple problems at once: accelerating well remediation. By using the state's authority to speed well cleanup we can reduce the environmental and fiscal risk from these wells and create good jobs.