When the Oil Runs Dry

Summary

Up First from NPR

Episode: When the Oil Runs Dry

Release Date: September 7, 2025
Host: Ayesha Rascoe
Guest Reporter: Camila Domonosky

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Overview

This episode of NPR's "The Sunday Story" takes a deep dive into the hidden, lingering consequences of the U.S. oil industry’s century-and-a-half boom. Host Ayesha Rascoe speaks with NPR correspondent Camila Domonosky, who unpacks the life cycle of oil wells—from gushing infancy to slow, polluting death—and investigates the scale, costs, and environmental perils of millions of old, marginal, and “orphan” wells across the country. The episode explores why these holes linger, why so few get plugged, and what happens when the oil—and responsibility—runs dry.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Introduction to America's Oil Well Legacy

• [00:00 – 01:26]

  • The U.S. has drilled millions of oil wells over 150+ years—wells that don’t simply vanish after their productive days end.
  • Camila Domonosky’s entry point: The vast majority of oil wells now make very little oil, contrary to public perception.

  “The vast majority of US oil wells make very little oil.”
  — Camila Domonosky [01:06]

  • Modern U.S. oil production is dominated by a minority of "super wells," while most wells “dribble along” with tiny output.

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2. The Oil Well Life Cycle and Risks of Abandonment

• [01:47 – 03:48]

  • Oil wells, after initial productivity, become harder to extract from—eventually requiring plugging with cement to prevent dangerous leaks (toxic chemicals, methane).
  • Methane is particularly potent: “more than 28 times as powerful…than carbon dioxide” as a greenhouse gas [02:18].

  “At first, it’s like opening a bottle of soda. It wants to explode out, but then, over time...it gets harder and harder as you go.”
  — Camila Domonosky [02:08]

  • Many old wells are not properly closed, continuing to "dribble" oil and, more troublingly, leak pollutants.

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3. America’s Struggle to Shut Down Old Wells

• [03:48 – 06:03]
  • The oil industry is better at creating new wells than shutting old ones down.
  • Government policies and tax incentives encourage keeping low-output ("marginal" or "stripper") wells running to squeeze remaining resources, not to decommission.
  • Example from Oklahoma: Many wells barely produce, but “even a little bit of oil is a lot of money.” [10:47]

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4. On the Ground in Oklahoma: The World of Marginal Wells

• [06:03 – 12:12]

  • Reporter joins petroleum engineer Dan Arthur and oil field owner Scott Rabinowitz in Tulsa.

  • Field visit reveals:

    • Some wells still pump a tiny amount (e.g., 3 barrels a day), generating thousands monthly if oil prices are favorable, justifying their continued operation.
    • Marginal wells (“stripper wells”): 77% of U.S. wells, but provide only 6% of oil—and up to half the methane pollution from oil production.

    “So the wells that are making up just 6% of American oil are making half of the methane pollution.”
    — Ayesha Rascoe [09:16]

  • Costs for plugging: Minimum of $12,000 per well, sometimes hundreds of thousands—strong disincentive for operators to shut them down.

  “Plugging a well is just really expensive.”
  — Camila Domonosky [12:35]

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5. The Plague of Orphan Wells

• [12:50 – 19:13]

  • Orphan wells: Abandoned with no responsible owner, often polluting communities and landscapes.
  • Many orphans stem from bankruptcies, flipping ownership, or simply ancient, untracked production.
  • Field trip: Orphan wells are often little more than “a janky looking pipe sticking out of the ground less than waist high.” [15:16]
  • There could be 1.5 million orphan wells nationwide—many unmapped or unaccounted for.

  “You got to go get your ass out and find them.”
  — Carter Arthur [16:52]

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6. The Challenge of Liability and Regulation

• [19:13 – 21:15]

  • Companies are supposed to put up bonds (like insurance) for plugging, but the required amounts are far below the real costs.
  • If a well is orphaned, public programs must step in—slow and expensive.

  “The problem is that the amount that’s put up through those bonds is just a fraction of what it actually costs to plug a well.”
  — Camila Domonosky [20:06]

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7. Plugging Wells: A Costly, Daunting Task

• [21:19 – 25:56]

  • Reporter visits Maria Burns in Ohio, whose front yard harbors a leaking, twice-plugged natural gas well.
  • The state’s “Orphan Well Program” is overloaded; e.g., 353 wells plugged in a year, despite tens of thousands needing intervention.
  • Plugging is costly, dangerous, and not always permanent. Sometimes early plugs (even cement ones) fail after decades.

  “You plug it in, the plug don’t last.”
  — Ayesha Rascoe [23:08]

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8. The Larger Environmental and Policy Challenge

• [25:58 – 28:41]

  • Even improved technology can't guarantee plugs will hold for centuries.
  • The economic incentive is to drill for profits now, not spend money sealing up the past’s messes—leaving massive problems for future generations.

  “You can make money drilling a well, but it costs money to plug it.”
  — Camila Domonosky [26:17]

  • There are initiatives: federal and state funding, drone surveys, carbon-market solutions, NGOs tracking and advocating—but the scale of the problem is staggering.

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9. The Broader Lesson: Lingering Costs of Traditional Energy

• [27:19 – 28:41]

  • The aftereffects of traditional energy—oil, coal, nuclear—remain long after production ends. Even wind and solar have end-of-life considerations.

  “Even when we’re done with the resource, there’s still this lingering cost of using the resource.”
  — Ayesha Rascoe [27:19]

  • The core dilemma: American energy economics rewards extraction, but not clean closure; environmental costs outlast profit timelines.

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Memorable Quotes (with Attributions & Timestamps)

• “The vast majority of US oil wells make very little oil.”
  — Camila Domonosky, [01:06]

• “So the wells that are making up just 6% of American oil are making half of the methane pollution.”
  — Ayesha Rascoe, [09:16]

• “Plugging a well is just really expensive.”
  — Camila Domonosky, [12:35]

• “You got to go get your ass out and find them.”
  — Carter Arthur, [16:52]

• “The problem is that the amount that’s put up through those bonds is just a fraction of what it actually costs to plug a well.”
  — Camila Domonosky, [20:06]

• “You plug it in, the plug don’t last.”
  — Ayesha Rascoe, [23:08]

• “You can make money drilling a well, but it costs money to plug it.”
  — Camila Domonosky, [26:17]

• “Even when we’re done with the resource, there’s still this lingering cost of using the resource.”
  — Ayesha Rascoe, [27:19]

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Detailed Timeline of Important Segments

• [00:00] — Introduction to the episode; history of US oil wells.
• [01:06] — The surprising reality: most wells produce little oil.
• [02:08] — Explanation of the oil well life cycle and pressing environmental concerns.
• [06:03–12:12] — Field reporting from Oklahoma; economics of marginal wells.
• [14:44–19:13] — Discovery and explanation of orphan wells; field detection stories.
• [21:19–25:56] — Visiting Ohio site; challenges and failures of plugging wells.
• [27:19–28:41] — Reflection: broader, lasting impacts of the fossil fuel industry.

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Tone & Style

• Engaged, explanatory, and personal.
• The hosts and guests blend technical insight with vivid on-the-ground storytelling and occasional wry humor.

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Conclusion

The episode reveals how America’s oil boom leaves an enduring, often invisible environmental debt. Wells continue to leak and pollute long after their usefulness has ended, and the economic structure of the industry—profit today, cost tomorrow—means the nation is left with a sprawling, expensive mess.

Efforts are underway to map, monitor, and plug these ticking time bombs, but the task is massive. The discussion prompts listeners to reconsider not just oil, but the full life cycles and hidden costs of all our energy choices.

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Episode Recommendation:
For listeners seeking to understand both the visible and hidden legacies of America’s relentless pursuit of oil, and the urgent need to reckon with the costs—environmental, financial, and moral—left behind.

Transcript

[Camila Domonosky]

Aisha.

[Aisha Rascoe]

I'm Aisha Rascoe, and this is the Sunday Story, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. For more than 150 years, the US has been drilling for oil. That meant punching millions of wells deep into the earth. And those wells, they don't just go away when that big gush of oil is over. Today, our big story is about the life, death, and afterlife of oil wells. We're talking to NPR's Camila Domonosky, who did a series of stories all about these wells. Hey, Camila.

[Camila Domonosky]

Hi, Aisha.

[Aisha Rascoe]

So now, you know, I used to be an energy reporter, and so I. I really follow that news. I'm. I'm always into, like, the energy story, especially with oil. And, of course, there's a lot going on in the energy world right now.

[Camila Domonosky]

You could say that again. Yeah.

[Aisha Rascoe]

So can I ask you, like, what made you want to cover these old wells, which are, you know, I mean, you look at it, it's like, literally old news.

[Camila Domonosky]

I honestly fell down a rabbit hole based on a single fact that blew my mind, which is that the vast majority of US Oil wells make very little oil.

[Aisha Rascoe]

That's really not what you would think. That's very counterintuitive. So what's going on here?

[Camila Domonosky]

Yeah, well, what's happening is most of the Wells in the US more than 3/4 of them, are only making a tiny bit of oil. When you put all the wells of the country together, the US Makes a ton of oil. It's the largest producer ever. But most of that comes from a relatively small number of wells, which are absolute beasts. They spit out huge amounts of oil.

[Aisha Rascoe]

So, like the overachievers.

[Camila Domonosky]

That's right. But all of these wells have a life cycle, so they extract a bunch of oil, and then they sort of peter out.

[Aisha Rascoe]

Okay. Because the way this works is that the oil is under pressure, way underground, and then when you pump it up, it loses that pressure.

[Camila Domonosky]

Right. So at first, it's like opening a bottle of soda is how people have described it to me. It wants to explode out, but then over time, it becomes a lot more like a tub toothpaste, where you're squeezing it out, and it gets harder and harder as you go. So eventually the well is pretty much done. And at that point, you have to plug it, you have to fill it with cement from the bottom to the top so that it's not just a big hole. And that's really important. Right. Because otherwise stuff might leak up from deep underground, including toxic chemicals. And also methane, which is a super potent greenhouse gas. It's more than 28 times as powerful when it comes to planet warming than carbon dioxide.

[Aisha Rascoe]

Okay, you gotta cue the ominous music right there. That, that methane is a beast as well.

[Camila Domonosky]

Right. That lurks beneath. So that's the life cycle of an oil well. It's born, it gushes, it peters out, and it gets plugged. And so the thing that made me go, what was that? There are all of these wells, a truly huge number of wells that are mostly dry, but they are not plant. They're just dribbling along, making tiny, tiny bits of oil.

[Aisha Rascoe]

I mean, like why, like what you know, and how are they dribbling exactly?

[Camila Domonosky]

Why are these wells still around? Yeah, and so a couple years ago I was asking lots of people as I was working on various stories, versions of this question, which is not like a super sophisticated question, like why so many old wells? And what people explained to me is that the oil industry is simply much better at creating new wells than it is at shutting them down.

[Aisha Rascoe]

Today on the Sunday story, the long lingering cost of America's love affair with oil. Stay with us.

[Dan Arthur]

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[Camila Domonosky]

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[Aisha Rascoe]

We'Re back with the Sunday story and Camila Domonosky, who's been looking at the afterlife of oil wells. So, Camila, you say the oil industry is much better at creating new wells than shutting them down. Like, what does that actually look like in practice?

[Camila Domonosky]

Yeah. Let's go to Oklahoma. That's a state that has a lot of old wells. And it also is home to a guy named Dan Arthur. When I was asking People My Oil 101 questions, his name came up. He's a petroleum engineer who once worked with the Environmental Protection Agency and has thought deeply about these wells for decades. And when I first contacted him and I asked if we could chat, he mentioned that he was going to be going out with his stepson to look for old oil wells on their spring break.

[Aisha Rascoe]

Wait, spring break looking at oil wells?

[Camila Domonosky]

Yeah, that was their fun vacation plan. And so obviously I asked if I could come along. And last spring I went out to Tulsa, Oklahoma. And just about the first thing that Arthur did when I met him was he handed me a fossil.

[Carter Arthur]

This is a jawbone from a Triceratops in Montana.

[Camila Domonosky]

My four year old's gonna be so pumped when I tell him I touched part of an actual Triceratops.

[Carter Arthur]

There you go.

[Camila Domonosky]

Mind blown. Arthur is into fossils and fossil fuels. Anyway, then we hopped into his pickup.

[Carter Arthur]

So we are gonna go to a, an oil field first discovered in 1906 and still producing.

[Camila Domonosky]

Wow. This particular field, which is called Bird Creek, it's owned by Arthur's friend Scott Rabinowitz. It has produced more than 20 million barrels of oil. And Rabinowitz says that's just a small fraction of what's underground.

[Scott Rabinowitz]

So there's a lot of oil left.

[Camila Domonosky]

There's still toothpaste in that tube. It's just a lot harder to get out. We were standing in this sort of scrubby field with a bunch of pump jacks very close together. And for listeners who have maybe never been in oil country, those are the things that look kind of like abstract statues of giant birds. Rabinowitz walked me over to one of his wells, which was first drilled in the 1920s by Texaco, and it is still pumping Today, although its Big Gusher days are long, long behind it. So how much oil does this well make?

[Scott Rabinowitz]

This well makes about three barrels a day.

[Camila Domonosky]

Three barrels a day is pretty close to nothing. A new well will average over 1,000 per day in the US right now. But at 60 or 70 bucks a barrel, minus royalties and overhead, a single well like this can still make several thousand dollars per month. And Rabinowitz has hundreds of them. And these kinds of wells, they're called marginal wells or stripper wells, because they're stripping little bits of oil out from underground. Anyway, the thing is that these kinds of wells are very vulner to swings in the price of oil because they produce such a tiny bit. So you really need a good price to keep them running. And it has long been government policy to try to keep wells like this open as long as possible through special tax breaks, for instance. And that's because oil is a national resource, and nobody wants it to go to waste if there's even a little bit more to squeeze out. So these marginal wells, they produce just a tiny fraction of the oil in the US they're 77% of the country's oil wells, but together they produce just 6% of the country's oil. And there's a problem, because those same wells are responsible for more like half of the methane pollution from oil production.

[Aisha Rascoe]

So the wells that are making up just 6% of American oil are making half of the methane pollution.

[Camila Domonosky]

Exactly right. And that's got environmental groups making the case that these wells should be monitored for methane pollution, which is challenging when the economics of these wells wells rely on keeping costs as low as possible. And some folks are also making the case that more of them should simply be shut down. I spoke to Kara Joy McKee of the Sierra Club of Oklahoma about this. These piddly little wells that are just drip drabbing out a little bit of.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Profit while polluting on the other end.

[Camila Domonosky]

They'Re not worth it.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

The health costs to our society and the future costs to our world are really way too high to pay.

[Aisha Rascoe]

So what does someone like Rabinowitz say to that argument?

[Camila Domonosky]

Well, you know, he doesn't deny climate science. He acknowledges that making oil and gas comes with an environmental cost that isn't factored in to the finances of these old wells. But when he looks at marginal wells, he sees opportunity. And I asked him about that one well that we are looking at out in his field. How long will it be able to make through rails a day?

[Scott Rabinowitz]

This well will be here as long as we Manage the reservoir in a proper manner, and someone takes care of this every day. This well should be here for another 30 or 40 years.

[Camila Domonosky]

So dribbling out oil and money for decades to come.

[Aisha Rascoe]

So Camilla, is this the answer to your question that these wells stay open? Because even a little bit of oil is a lot of money?

[Camila Domonosky]

I mean, partly, but it's not the whole answer. When I was outstanding in that field, I realized that there was something that I, I had been missing. Rabinowitz had just explained to me that he had about 42 wells in this field that were actively involved in making oil. But I knew that some of the wells we were looking at were not active. So I asked him how many of these wells are not doing anything?

[Scott Rabinowitz]

So I would say we probably have 1700 acres, upwards of about 175.

[Camila Domonosky]

Wow. So it's actually not that many of the wells that are here that are still producing.

[Scott Rabinowitz]

Correct.

[Camila Domonosky]

And that blew my mind. In that old oil field, the vast majority of the wells were not making any oil at all. And like we said before, when an oil well is done, it's supposed to be plugged. So I asked Rabinowitz, how many wells do you close in a year? How many wells do you shut in.

[Scott Rabinowitz]

When you say close?

[Camila Domonosky]

Plug and abandon.

[Scott Rabinowitz]

So we have plugged in, plugged maybe two or three wells at Bird Creek, total or well total on this field through our tenure.

[Camila Domonosky]

Almost none of them had been plugged.

[Aisha Rascoe]

So why wasn't he plugging those wells? I mean, they're not making any money.

[Camila Domonosky]

So two reasons. One is he thinks that they could pull more oil out in the future. Like maybe new technology could get out more of that oil that's trapped underground. And that can happen. He has wells operating now that used to be defunct, that he revived. It probably won't happen for all of them, but that is one reason.

[Aisha Rascoe]

So, so what's the other reason?

[Camila Domonosky]

Plugging a well is just really expensive. Rabinowitz said for him it would start at $12,000 per well and it goes up from there. Some wells can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

[Aisha Rascoe]

Okay. Of course. I mean, you don't want to pay that money unless you have to.

[Camila Domonosky]

Uh huh. So going back to my original question, this is another reason why old wells don't get plugged. It's not just that they might be making money, it's that it costs money to shut them down. And on these first wells that we visited, you know, these are Scott Rabinowitz's legal responsibility. He is on the hook to plug them someday. But there are lots of wells for which that's not true. Wells that are nobody's responsibility. Those are called orphan whales.

[Aisha Rascoe]

You know, I love these names. Stripper whales. Now, orphan whales, all of this. And I need to hear about this one when we come back. How a whale becomes an orphan whale.

[Dan Arthur]

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[Aisha Rascoe]

We're back with Camila Domonosky and the Sunday story. So Camila, you also took some time on this trip to think about orphan wells.

[Camila Domonosky]

That's right. I was riding along with Dan Arthur and his stepson Carter.

[Carter Arthur]

Carter, keep your eyes peeled, you know, for if you see any, any other wells or anything like that.

[Camila Domonosky]

Carter was 13 at the time and he almost immediately spotted an old well on the side of the road. And Aisha, I'm going to be totally honest, I did not see it at all. Where by that? It's by the fire hydrant right there. That pipe, just stick it up. Yep.

[Carter Arthur]

That's an orphan well.

[Camila Domonosky]

Oh my gosh. It looks like a fence post. No, in my defense, it was very easy to miss. It was literally just a janky looking pipe sticking out of the ground less than waist high. Not a big pump jack or anything. And there are old wells like this from California to Pennsylvania a ton in Texas and Louisiana, anywhere there's ever been an oil industry. Basically, they might be in the middle of a farm or a ranch or right next to schools and houses. Some of them leak oil or methane or chemicals into the water or into the air and they contribute to climate change. They don't emit as much methane as Agriculture or the active oil and gas industry, but it's still a meaningful amount. And there are so many wells like this, at least hundreds of thousands. And Dan Arthur estimates a million and a half, which several experts have told me is plausible. And we don't even know where they all are now.

[Aisha Rascoe]

How is that possible?

[Camila Domonosky]

Well, the oil industry has been around for a long time. You know, Dan and Carter, Arthur and I, we were driving around through Osage county, which is the location for that movie Killers of the flower moon. 100 years ago, there was an oil boom, and white people murdered many members of the Osage tribe to steal their oil wealth. And a few of the wells that were drilled in that bloody time are actually still pumping. A bunch of others are now defunct, and they are not all on maps, as Arthur put it.

[Carter Arthur]

Yeah, you think all these early wells and, you know, in Osage county, when they're drilling, got had permits? No. You know, so that's, you know. So how do you. How do you find them? How do you know? You got to go get your ass out and find them.

[Aisha Rascoe]

So that's one reason. These are really old wells. They, you know, they didn't have the Internet, and people were just, like, going out, sticking the pipes in the ground. They weren't talking to nobody. They were just doing what they wanted to do.

[Camila Domonosky]

That's right. There is another reason, which is that wells do still get orphaned. Now, an old idle well can get sold off from one company to another company, passed along like a hot potato. And if a company is holding onto them and goes bankrupt, except now there is no company that is responsible for those wells, that's liable for those wells. And here's the thing. You can't figure out whether or not that happened from just looking at a well. At one point, Dan and Carter and Arthur and I were driving through this beautiful prairie preserve near Tulsa, Oklahoma. The air smelled like smoke from these nearby brush fires. There were bison roaming around on rolling hills covered with native grasses. Carter wanted to get out and pet them, which we obviously did not do. But they're so fluffy. Just true. They were. And then Dan Arthur saw something. Oh, what do you see?

[Carter Arthur]

So what I spotted here is what appears to be an orphan well, maybe a couple of orphan well wells. So here, and maybe one even over there. So let's get out and take a look.

[Camila Domonosky]

This thing charged.

[Dan Arthur]

Okay.

[Camila Domonosky]

Oh, watch out for buffalo poop. We found a couple of pipes sticking out of the ground with little metal caps on top. But was this actually an orphan well or just an idle well, we didn't know. I actually spent some time trying to figure out who owned this exact well, and what I found was that it was disputed. There were some different stories about it. So it can be really tricky trying to figure out who is liable for a well, if anybody is.

[Aisha Rascoe]

And why does it matter who's liable for them?

[Camila Domonosky]

Well, remember that these wells can be sources of pollution out in that prairie preserve. One of Dan Arthur's employees, Daniel Caldwell, was with us with this exception. Expensive camera that makes invisible gas leaks visible. And those particular wells, they looked good, actually. They were not leaking, but some old tanks that used to be connected to them. Okay.

[Carter Arthur]

Yeah, See where the hatch is?

[Camila Domonosky]

I think there's a plume. Caldwell zoomed in and Arthur and I took a peek through the camera. Oh, there it is. Yeah, there's a little bit.

[Aisha Rascoe]

Just a little.

[Carter Arthur]

Yeah, you can kind of see kind of moving upward and kind of away.

[Camila Domonosky]

A little stream of planet warming gases rising up into the air. Now, this leaky tank is not as bad as a leaking well, but there are plenty of those out there, and collectively, it is a real problem. Methane, far more potent than carbon dioxide. And when you're talking about orphan wells, they don't benefit anybody. They don't make food or energy or money. There is no reason for them to be open except the fact that they're expensive to close. And if a company owns that well, a regulator, like a state government could force them to plug it, and the company would have to cover the cost. That's why that liability matters. But if it's an orphan well, nobody is legally responsible. And to be clear, wells are not supposed to be orphaned, right? Companies are supposed to plug wells when they're done. And in case they go bankrupt, companies are also supposed to put up money in advance to cover the costs of plugging their wells. Often that's done through a surety bond, which is kind of like buying an insurance policy. You pay a company to agree to cover this cost if you go bankrupt with these wells on your hands. The problem is that the amount that's put up through those bonds is just a fraction of what it actually costs to plug a well.

[Aisha Rascoe]

So what happens when the money's not there?

[Camila Domonosky]

Well, historically, a lot of these wells simply haven't been plugged, and they might just keep leaking climate warming gases and toxic substances. Now, there are programs that put up money to plug them, including one from the federal government that has billions set aside. Some of that money is currently frozen by the Trump administration. But the Department of the Interior Told NPR that the money is set to resume flowing after a review. And some states have programs, too. So the next thing that I did was I wanted to see what it's like to actually plug a well. And last fall, I went to Ohio, to the front yard of Maria Burns. Normally, the loudest thing in her yard in Ashland, Ohio, would be the cacophony of dogs. She runs a dog grooming business, and she also has more than a dozen of her own rescues.

[Aisha Rascoe]

So they're all old.

[Camila Domonosky]

But on the day that I visited her, those dogs were drowned out by the three story tall drill that was working out front. Burns had an old natural gas well in her front yard, and around it, grass didn't grow. The pine trees kept dying. Yeah, and there was another tree that sat there and it died. So back in 1911, before the houses on this block were built, an oilman named E.C. mcManaway had drilled a natural gas well here. And just like an oil well, a natural gas well has a life cycle. After 40 years of production, this well petered out, and it was plugged in 1953.

[Aisha Rascoe]

Well, so, I mean, this well was plugged.

[Camila Domonosky]

Yep, 70 years ago. And Maria Burns is 79, and she grew up in this house. She saw it when it was filled up with cement. The first time I can remember, because we were. My sister and I were just little. Yeah, just little. But Aisha, after decades and decades passed, the well started to leak.

[Aisha Rascoe]

Well, that, I mean, that is not good. I hadn't even thought about that. You plug it in, the plug don't last.

[Camila Domonosky]

Yep. So the company that owned that well had done everything right back in the 50s. Right. They filled the well, they checked that box. So once it started leaking again, it was not their liability. This well, too, was now an orphan. And it wasn't Maria Burns responsibility to fix it, but it was leaking into her yard, so she reached out for help. It took me quite a while, but. It's called the Orphan Well Program in Ohio. The program pays to seal up those old wells and make them safer. But you have to get on a list because evidently there are a few. Quite a few. Remember how there are possibly more than a million orphan wells across the country? Even in just one state, the number can be daunting.

[Aisha Rascoe]

There are surely tens of thousands of.

[Camila Domonosky]

Unplugged wells in Ohio. That's Mary Mertz, the director of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. In fiscal year 24, we plugged 353 wells. And I know that doesn't sound like a lot, but she says it's a lot more than the state used to plug. The scale of the challenge is so big, especially when you think about what can be involved in plugging a single well.

[Aisha Rascoe]

Break that down for us. Like, why would this be hard?

[Camila Domonosky]

Well, first you have to clean out the well. Some of these old wells were, quote unquote, plugged with things like wood or trash. That's no good. Or in the case of Maria Burns in Ohio, there was a failing cement plug to clear out.

[Aisha Rascoe]

What we are doing right now is we are drilling out that cement plug that was placed in 1953.

[Camila Domonosky]

That's Amanda Veaze, Vice President of Business Development with CSR Services. Her company was plugging this well at Maria Burns house. After the old plug came out, the team had to fill the well again from the bottom to the top with cement, not the knobbly concrete that you would make a sidewalk out of. It has to be a very specific mix of cement. And it turns out this well was even more complicated than expected. I called up Maria Burns recently to check in with her, and she said it took them more months and multiple tries to get the well properly plugged. And it took a couple of tries to get the landscaping fixed, too. The soil had been more contaminated than they originally realized, and they had to replace a whole bunch of soil. So this whole process is not cheap. And then, of course, the well in Maria Burns yard had already been plugged once. Right. So I asked Vise, how can we be sure that the wells we're plugging now, 50 or 100 years from now, they aren't going to need to drill up and plug again?

[Aisha Rascoe]

So there's. There's no guarantee of that.

[Camila Domonosky]

What happens 100 years down the line. Now, she does say industry standards for well plugging have improved over the years, so plugs should last longer than they used to. But, you know, the question of the lifespan of these plugs is a real concern.

[Aisha Rascoe]

I mean, all of this is really kind of over overwhelming to think about.

[Camila Domonosky]

I. I know, believe me. You know, the fundamental problem behind all of this is that you can make money drilling a well, but it costs money to plug it. Right. And the oil industry has known about this for a long time, and there are lots of people trying to fix the problem. There's the billions of dollars that the federal government dedicated, which is only a first step, but it is a big one. There's community activists working to raise awareness about old wells. The Department of Energy has done things like sending out drones to locate orphans. There's this whole interesting, complicated effort to use voluntary carbon markets to fund well plugging. Basically companies that want to go green pay to plug wells. And there's a whole bunch of state level efforts to tighten up regulations so that the oil industry does actually clean up as it goes along. But even with all these efforts underway, it's just a massive problem, the number of orphan wells that are out there, let alone the ones that might be created in the future. It's honestly hard to wrap your head around.

[Aisha Rascoe]

You know, this really makes me think about how all the traditional forms of energy that we have used in this country, even after they are no longer in use, they're no longer providing us with anything, they still have this lasting impact on land and the environment. Whether you think of like nuclear power or coal mining with the shutting down those plants, like even when we're done with the resource, there's still this lingering cost of using the resource.

[Camila Domonosky]

That's right. And it can linger for a really long time. Right. Whether you're thinking about those coal mines or wells or nuclear waste. And you know, even with, with newer forms of energy like solar and wind that don't use up fuels, there are still long term consequences to think about. Right. Things like whether a wind turbine or solar panel is recyclable or whether it's just future trash. You know, we need energy today, but we've also got to meet that need without leaving problems for the next generation. Right. And what we have seen from a century and a half of the oil industry is that it is really challenging to do that when the economic incentives, the money making opportunities are all about today rather than tomorrow.

[Aisha Rascoe]

Camila, thank you so much. You know, I always love to talk about energy, so thank you for this reporting because it's really important.

[Camila Domonosky]

Thank you so much for having me. Always a pleasure to talk with you.

[Aisha Rascoe]

That was Camila Domonosky, a correspondent with NPR's business desk. This episode was produced by Andrew Mambo. It was edited by Jenny Schmidt and Cara Platoni. It was fact checked by Suzy Cummings and engineered by Robert Rodriguez. The rest of the Sunday Story team includes Justine Yan and Liana Simstrom. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Aisha Roscoe. Up first is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.

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