For the sixth year in a row, West Virginia lawmakers didn’t take up legislation that would ensure oil and gas wells are cleaned up by the companies that profit off of them.
As non-producing wells are left unplugged and abandoned by their operators, they risk becoming orphaned — wells with no solvent or existing driller. The cleanup of these wells then falls to the state and taxpayers.
However, the Orphan Oil and Gas Well Prevention Act, which was introduced in the Senate and the House, would have stopped wells from becoming orphaned by ensuring proper funding to plug wells once they no longer produce oil or gas.
The legislation would have replaced the current bonding system to operate oil and gas wells and instead require companies to set aside money in advance to cover the full cost of plugging their wells.
While the bills were introduced in both chambers, lawmakers didn’t put either on a committee agenda — a common fate for this piece of legislation. A version of the bill has been introduced in both chambers every year since 2019 but has never been considered by a committee or advanced to the floor for a vote.
“We ran out of time working on it,” said Sen. Randy Smith, R-Tucker, chair of the Senate Energy, Industry and Mining Committee and the bill’s lead sponsor. Smith has been the lead sponsor of the Senate bill every year it’s been introduced.
“I didn’t want to put something out there that I knew was going to die on the other side,” Smith added.
He said that negotiations this year between lawmakers, gas companies and environmental groups were close to a compromise but didn’t reach a final agreement.
While environmental groups supported the bill, the gas industry did not.
A spokesperson for the Gas and Oil Association of West Virginia said the organization didn’t have an official position on the bill, but it was duplicative of existing avenues.
“There’s already a solution in place and it’s working,” she added.
But the current system has put the burden on West Virginia regulators — and taxpayers — to clean up more than 6,000 orphaned wells, and a recent influx of federal money is only enough to plug a fraction of them. And without some change to state regulations, there is a risk that cleanup for tens of thousands more wells could fall to the state as well.
Environmental groups that have been raising the alarm about orphaned and abandoned wells fully backed the bill. Lucia Valentine, a lobbyist for the West Virginia Environmental Council, expressed disappointment that lawmakers didn’t move the bill, adding it should be a priority because of the environmental and public health impact of unplugged wells.
“We’re facing a very real crisis here,” she said. “Wells are not getting plugged fast enough.”
While the legislative effort has failed for yet another year, Smith said he plans to continue working on a bill “that everybody can live with.”