Maria Burns watched with satisfaction as a three-story-high drilling rig made a racket in her front yard.
Normally, the loudest thing on this residential street in Ashland, Ohio, would be the barking of dogs — Burns runs a grooming business out of her home. But the heavy equipment operating was so noisy it was hard to talk.
The rig was there at Burns' request — and the state of Ohio's expense — to solve a problem that dates back more than a century. There's an old natural gas well in this yard, extending nearly a half-mile underground. It's long defunct, plugged 70 years ago.
But while old wells might be forgotten, they never go away. After decades, this plugged well started to leak.
"Grass didn't grow," Burns said. "The pine trees kept dying. And there was another tree that sat there, and it died."
Leaks from defunct oil and gas wells are a problem for more than just plant life. The chemicals that leach up from deep underground, including benzene and arsenic, can harm human health and leach into water reservoirs. And any remaining natural gas that works its way into the atmosphere contributes to global warming. Natural gas is almost entirely composed of methane, a greenhouse gas that's far more potent than carbon dioxide.
Millions of oil and gas wells have been drilled in the U.S. since the oil industry was launched in the 1800s. A small number of those might conceivably be repurposed for something else — making geothermal power, for instance. But the vast majority will someday need to be plugged.
Doing that properly is neither easy nor cheap. And if plugging isn't done properly, it might not last — as Burns discovered.
Burns, 79, was a little girl in the 1950s when this well outside her family home was plugged for the first time. She remembers watching the workers as they poured cement into the hole in the ground.
Last fall, she was watching as that work was ripped out of the ground and done again from scratch.
"I'll be glad to get it done, over with," Burns said. "And never have to worry about it again."
What lies beneath
At ground level on Maria Burns' street, you see the present day: a quiet neighborhood, with a modest church and a handful of houses.
Start drilling underground, and in a way, you travel into the past. Through the soil created by centuries of decomposing plant life, through rocks ground down by shifting rivers and slowly moving mountains. Eventually, you reach the sandstone that formed hundreds of millions of years ago, when present-day Ohio was covered by a shallow sea.
Trapped in the pores of that sandstone are molecules that are even older still: the remains of countless prehistoric lifeforms, transformed by time and heat into oil and natural gas. That process happened even deeper in the earth. But oil and natural gas don't like to stay put; in an underground formation, both those substances want to go up. And these particular reservoirs of oil and gas worked their way upward through layers of rock until they became enmeshed in the sandstone.
Think of water flowing until it reaches a dam: It pools where gravity makes it stop. The same thing can happen in oil and gas formations; the fuel moves up until it's stopped, and there, it starts to accumulate. That high concentration of fuel is valuable.
This journey through time and space explains why drillers have been interested in Ohio's sandstone formations since 1887.
It also explains why properly plugging an oil well is essential. Any remaining oil and gas, or other underground deposits of chemicals like hydrogen sulfide, could use the old well as a path to migrate up and into the atmosphere. They might also migrate sideways, into other layers of the earth — like those filled with water that people rely on. The result could be pollution both above and below ground, potentially harming local plants, animals and people, or escaping into the atmosphere and contributing to climate change.
So to plug a well, you can't just put a little cap on the top. You have to fill it with cement.
And to fill that well all the way, you have to start from the bottom.
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"You need to be able to get your tools, your cement tools, all the way to the bottom of the well," said Amanda Veazey, a vice president with CSR Services, the company that filled the well in Burns' yard.
Before they could start the cementing process, her team had to drill out the previous plug. It was a weekslong process, the noisy drill pushing further into the earth one 30-foot section at a time. The old cement got broken up and flushed out of the wellbore — the hole into the earth — with water, which was recycled through again and again.
Veazey dipped a sieve into the flowing water to capture some of the chunks of cement. "They're tiny," she said. "A little bit larger than sugar crystals."
Bit by bit, all that old material had to come out before the cement trucks could arrive and start the process of plugging the well — again.
And that was only the start of a very long process. While some wells can be plugged in a matter of days, the well in Burns' yard was not one of them. It took several tries to plug the well fully, and then multiple attempts to restore the yard's landscaping after the soil turned out to be more contaminated than anyone initially thought. "They were here from October to April," Burns said ruefully last week. "I hope they're finally done."
A problem for everyone, with no one on the hook
The well in Burns' yard was an "orphan well," meaning a well for which no oil or gas company is legally responsible.
It wasn't Burns' job to fix it, either. But it was her yard. So she looked for help, and found Ohio's Orphan Well Program, which has been around for decades. After a few years, they were able to send the rig out.
"It took me quite a while," she said. "You have to get on the list." That's because the need for those plugging services far outstrips the state's abilities.
The exact number of orphan wells in the U.S. is not known, because many are not documented. But there are millions of old wells in the U.S.; one estimate, which is known to be an undercount, is that hundreds of thousands of those are orphan wells. Multiple experts have told NPR it's possible the national figure is more than a million. "There are surely tens of thousands of unplugged wells in Ohio," says Mary Mertz, the director of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
In the 2024 fiscal year, the state of Ohio plugged 353 orphan wells, she says.
"I know that doesn't sound like a lot," Mertz says, almost apologetically. But, she notes, it's a big increase from the handful of wells the program used to plug. (In fiscal year 2017, the state plugged 15 wells.)
Plugging wells is not supposed to be the state's responsibility. In every state, the company that drills a well is required to seal it up safely at the end of its useful life. But there are several ways the public might wind up saddled with a problem well. The company that drilled the well may have plugged it, satisfying the legal requirements. But if the well starts to leak again decades later, the company isn't responsible for plugging it again. (That's what happened to the well in Burns' yard.)
There are also a number of wells from the early, less-regulated days of the oil industry, before plugging was required by law.
And then there are newer orphan wells. They're most commonly created when a company that is legally on the hook for plugging a well goes bankrupt.
To address this risk, companies are required to put up money or get an insurance policy to cover the costs of well plugging in case they go under. The problem is the money involved — often in the form of a surety bond — is woefully inadequate.
Last year, ProPublica examined the bond requirements in major oil-producing states, and compared it to the cost of actually plugging wells in each one. Overall, companies in oil-producing states are required to secure enough money to cover less than 2% of the potential costs incurred.
Some states are better off than others. Wyoming has set aside enough for 42% percent of the possible bill. But in Texas, the heart of the U.S. oil industry, it's only 1.5%.
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To the extent that oil companies remain profitable and plug their wells, this isn't a problem. But when they go bankrupt and leave wells behind, someone else has to foot the bill.
There are efforts to use donations and voluntary carbon markets to pay for well-plugging. But overwhelmingly, plugging orphan wells is an obligation that has fallen on the government — or not been met at all.
A high cost and an uncertain future
In recent years, the government has started paying more attention to actually covering that bill. In addition to state-run programs like Ohio's, the federal government has now designated $4.7 billion dollars for plugging orphan wells. The program was launched under the Biden administration, and its future under the Trump administration is uncertain; the Department of the Interior told NPR in an emailed statement that some grants under the program will reopen for states to apply after a "policy review," while other elements of the program are currently active.
Unlike some of the Biden administration's environmental priorities, orphan well plugging generally has bipartisan support. Orphan wells are hazards to the public and perennial frustrations to landowners, and plugging them creates jobs in oil country.
But not all well-plugging programs are created equal. Ted Boettner is a senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley institute, a regional think tank. He has long studied orphan wells and says Ohio is doing a lot right. For instance, the state's program is funded by a fee on oil production instead of by taxpayers, which means the industry is, in a roundabout way, paying to clean up its own footprint.
"I do think Ohio offers a good example of what they're doing, in a very small way," he says. "That needs to be, you know, much larger in size."
The challenge for every effort to scale up well-plugging: It's expensive. In 2019, the federal government described $20,000 per well as the "low cost" scenario, and $145,000 as the "high cost" side of the spectrum. There's been significant inflation since then.
With potentially more than a million orphan wells — and bankruptcies and inadequate bonds leaving even more wells orphaned in the future — it's clear that the $4.7 billion in federal dollars is only a first step.
The well in Maria Burns' yard was particularly challenging, in part because the old plug also had to be removed. The well was bundled together with another for contracting purposes, and the cost to plug the two was more than $400,000.
It's impossible to predict how many previously plugged wells will require this kind of remediation. And it raises an uncomfortable point: Even if well-plugging teams tackle every single well, the work might not be over, because they can leak and need to be re-plugged.
"There's no guarantee of what happens 100 years down the line," said Veazey, the executive with CSR solutions. But, she noted, the industry has learned a lot over the decades.
In an earlier era, wells might be plugged with wood or other materials that would never be allowed today. And the cement formulas used now have been refined over time to be more durable.
How durable? We'll find out.
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