This company (Plants & Goodwin) is racing to fix Pennsylvania’s leaking wells
The EPA estimates that there are about 2.2 million unsealed wells in the United States.
Many of these orphan wells—earthen holes once used for oil and gas drilling that have no record of ownership or entity responsible for their cleanup—date back to black-gold rushes from decades or centuries past. In 1859, an unemployed railroad conductor struck oil north of Pittsburgh. Overnight, swaths of land were punctured by drills. Within three years, production in Pennsylvania increased from 4,500 barrels a year to 3 million. Boomtowns sprang up. Then more lucrative wells in other states caused the oil industry to go elsewhere. The Pennsylvania wells ran dry, and the infrastructure was abandoned. The wells were not plugged properly, and there were no standards for cleanup.
Today orphan wells leak toxic chemicals into groundwater and torpedo home values. And, according to the EPA, every year they emit 275,000 tons of methane, an especially potent greenhouse gas. In 2023, an orphan well was blamed for poisoning the drinking water of a township in rural Pennsylvania, and another caused an explosion on a ranch in West Texas.
Estimates for how many are out there, and where they are, are just as elusive as their ages. After the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allotted $4.7 billion to plug the wells, 26 states reported 126,806, but those are just the ones people know about. The EPA estimates that there are about 2.2 million unsealed in the United States, concentrated in drilling states like Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, West Virginia, New York, and Pennsylvania.
For 48 years, Plants & Goodwin, based in Bradford, near the New York border, serviced the active wells of Pennsylvania. The company even owned some. But when Luke Plants returned home in 2018 with an MBA, he began to transition the company to primarily capping.
“Well-plugging used to be given to whoever could do it cheapest and fastest, and I saw that there was a greater demand for more premium, high-quality decommissioning work to be done,” he said. “So that’s where we wanted to set ourselves apart.”
Plants & Goodwin retires active wells for oil drillers and contracts with state governments, whose pace of well-plugging has accelerated with the infrastructure bill money. Pennsylvania plugged more than 100 in 2023, up from a few dozen a year previously.
Plants has seen the ways that legacy wells can impede on rural and suburban areas. He’s encountered wells that leak methane and noxious fumes next to occupied houses and small-town recreation centers. He has been contacted when commercial developments were halted because construction crews discovered an antiquated well. And he knows that sometimes people siphon methane from abandoned wells for home heating and cooking.