A Shameless Plug: Abandoned Oil and Gas Wells and the Mythology of a Just Transition
The hype surrounding ill-conceived Green New Deal-style legislation merits reflection on the Left’s tendency to let a compelling story get in the way of acknowledging objective constraints.
Pump Jack in the San Ardo Oil Field, Monterey County, California. Photo by Molly Robinson. February 14, 2021.
If you listen to congressional Democrats, jobs for unemployed oil and gas workers are set to crawl out of holes like this year’s Brood X cicadas. The holes in question are abandoned and orphaned oil and gas wells: wells that no longer produce crude product or are non-productive and have no official operator. A $4.7 billion Senate bill, an $8 billion House bill, and an $8 billion funding package in Biden’s infrastructure plan aim to plug these wells and clean up local surroundings.
While funding amounts are certain to shift and have faced pushback from Republicans, the proposals have generally inspired optimism on the Left. Liberals and progressives see an opportunity to manifest a just transition for oil and gas workers who face an ongoing unemployment crisis: the industry had a 9.3 percent unemployment rate in May 2021, down from 14.3 percent in April. The summary of the Senate’s orphan well bill opens with a chipper epigraph, plucked from a Forbes article, describing the REGROW Act as a “win-win-win proposal that both Republicans and Democrats can support”: reducing methane emissions and soil contaminants while creating jobs. Elizabeth Gore, Senior Vice President for Political Affairs for the Environmental Defense Fund, lauded the Senate bill as “an important part of a just energy transition, growing local economies while solving old environmental problems.”
For Green New Dealers, this story has all of the right elements. Here's a policy that will supposedly achieve a bundle of environmental benefits while creating badly-needed jobs for oil and gas workers. The science and economics of well-plugging, however, are at odds with starry-eyed perspectives on the proposal.
Although framed as a boon to workers and the environment, well-plugging has hidden costs and uncertain environmental gains. A federal stimulus to plug will likely be economically inefficient and mostly ineffective at reducing emissions. These caveats call for reflection on why a federal stimulus for well-plugging has been so…well, shamelessly plugged by Democratic lawmakers, analysts, and journalists.
Let’s start with the science. Although unplugged wells can indeed emit methane, no one knows how much or which wells are chiefly responsible for emissions. The most comprehensive study to date on methane emissions from abandoned wells sourced measurements from just 598 wells in the United States and Canada—compare that to the approximately 4,000,000 abandoned wells in the United States alone. Lack of data and absence of emissions monitoring have made it difficult to discern which wells are high-emitting.
This uncertainty matters because most wells are likely benign: studies reveal that nearly all emissions come from a minority of exceptionally gassy perpetrators. In a measuring campaign of methane emissions at 37 non-productive wells in the Permian Basin, scientists discovered that two-thirds of the sampled wells emitted less than one gram of methane per hour. In other words, two-thirds of the wells individually emitted less than 0.01 metric tons of methane annually—significantly lower than the EPA’s estimate of 0.13 metric tons; for comparison, 0.01 metric tons of methane is about the amount belched out by a single cow in one year.
The finding that most wells are practically non-emitters is important because plugging can be very costly. A recent study published in the academic environmental science journal Elementa shows that restoration costs range from $1,000 to over $100,000, depending on the geophysical character of the well in question. What’s more, these costs cannot be readily anticipated without surveying wells individually. In an analysis of economic benefit per emissions avoided from plugging based on the social cost of carbon, the Elementa study’s authors found that plugging even the relatively rare high-emitters could be prohibitively expensive. This is not to suggest wells should never be plugged: the study’s authors ultimately conclude that, taken with other adverse environmental effects like pollution, it’s usually worth it to plug very high-emitting “monster” wells. The problem is that no one knows which wells are monsters, or how much plugging any given well will cost. A blanket approach might not be worth it for most wells, wasting valuable time, money, and labor-power that could be better spent elsewhere.
The inefficiency of capping innocuous abandoned wells is compounded by hidden costs of plugging. Consider first the carbon emissions and other pollutants which would result from making cement to fill the defunct wells. The problems don’t stop at pouring concrete into a hole: some capped wells are vented because sealing them off completely would lead to groundwater contamination, negating the climate benefits of plugging. This presents a potential tradeoff: vent methane and suffer its atmospheric warming effects, or risk contaminating groundwater by keeping it trapped below Earth’s surface. The reality is far from the “win-win-win” situation that policymakers imagine.
Finally, plugging abandoned wells also forgoes the opportunity to repurpose them. Brett Bennett, President of Native State Environmental, a 501(c)(3) in Texas addressing the orphan well problem, said that his organization partners with technology developers who explore the conversion potential of wells for geothermal and energy storage. Such projects promise climate benefits much larger than those of plugging, and better data and repurposing technology could be worth the cost paid by delay. In the meantime, a greater share of the well-plugging stimulus could go toward research and development, while the remainder could be allocated to projects that would more certainly would reduce emissions at-cost, such as expanding public transit and restoring land.
The pitfalls of plugging have been systematically overlooked by policy analysts and journalists. A 2020 landmark report by Resources for the Future and Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy does not take them into consideration, yet the report strongly influenced the $8 billion plugging proposal in Biden’s infrastructure plan.
The boosterism of well-plugging as a silver bullet has made it difficult to ask whether the money might be used more efficiently elsewhere in the economy. Why? Perhaps Left media has glossed over the finer details because the story is too convenient to be discarded; it fits neatly into the just transition narrative which anchors the Green New Deal. Climate and labor organizers gravitate toward well-plugging more than other job programs because it symbolically represents a commitment to stewarding displaced workers from especially high-carbon to especially low-carbon work with minimal retraining.
Doubts about federally-sponsored plugging have consequently been cast aside. For example, Daniel Raimi, an author of the report that shaped the abandoned well proposal in Biden’s infrastructure plan, appeared to hedge that report’s findings in a later article, questioning whether it would make sense to plug a well that cost $1 million to restore before shrugging: “Until researchers at RFF and elsewhere can gain a better understanding of [benefits and costs], policymakers will likely focus on the most valuable currency in the political arena: jobs.” He was right. But as for emission reductions, who’s keeping track?
A mass climate movement cannot afford to lose track. We must scrutinize the details of specific policy proposals with a mind to hone and perfect them. Lawmakers use reports produced by policy analysts whose job is to make scientific knowledge politically and economically operable, and this is never an innocent or objective process. Complicating matters further, analysts revise their recommendations to mirror shifting scientific consensus, but these changes are not necessarily reflected in a final policy framework. We cannot rely on the liberal wonks, especially when they are telling us what we want to hear: not just because they are biased, but because their analysis may be objectively flawed.
Rapidly and indiscriminately plugging would reward the impulse to declare that there is no time to refine scientific understanding, no time to wait for nascent technology. This view acknowledges and embraces the risk of implementing inefficient and perhaps cost-ineffective policy for the sake of expediency. Such impatience has currency amongst many climate activists and Green New Dealers who dismiss policy analysis as wonkish and time-consuming.
Time is indeed short. However, this truth does not answer the question of how to decarbonize. The abandoned wells debacle shows we cannot afford to dismiss details like the variation in methane emissions between an unplugged well in Pennsylvania and one in North Dakota. Overlooking such details risks squandering vital resources on inefficient projects that will only further delay decarbonization.
In the absence of careful analysis, the follies of the well-plugging bills will repeat themselves on other issues and timelines. Within the broad decarbonization timeline, there are thousands of mini-issues and timelines, some more pressing than others. The well-plugging timeline is less urgent than, say, the timeline for stopping companies from drilling new oil and gas wells that they will eventually abandon because, at bottom, decarbonization hinges on keeping carbon in the ground. Another urgent timeline involves developing technology to mitigate the environmental dangers of lithium mining, which is essential to the manufacture of EV batteries but also exacerbates water scarcity, often in Indigenous communities. Building intellectual capital and expertise within the movement will take time, but doing so will allow for clarity regarding which decarbonization efforts and timelines to tackle first, and how to do so.
Reflexive anti-wonkishness exaggerates the costs of reflection. Valid concerns about the merits of a proposal can be raised in the time that it takes to read a bill, or to research and write an article about why the bill will not meet its promises. Even under conditions of uncertainty, auditing policy analysis can reveal the limits of our knowledge, and can help us make informed decisions in light of potential tradeoffs. Only a climate movement that parses and examines the role of uncertainty is equipped to make demands that actually decarbonize and protect labor.
In the case of well-plugging, uncertainty in various forms—about how effectively plugging will reduce emissions, about the number of jobs that federally-sponsored plugging programs will create—has been erased. These uncertainties were burdensome plot elements that threatened to upend the mythology of a just transition, so they were abandoned.
Using the term “mythology” may prompt uneasiness, but it need not to: myth has long had a place in left-wing political imagination. French theorist and social thinker Georges Sorel was among the first to examine its centrality in revolutionary movements. He believed that mythic thinking allowed revolutionaries to express deep moral convictions while framing a future that was immune to the naysaying criticism of liberal rationalists. Sorel argued that its occurrence outside of historical time made myth a powerful tool for envisioning a future that was unconstrained by historical description, or by what had happened before and was therefore considered possible. Myth is an important tool for believing that a just transition is in view, that decarbonization is within reach, and that a mass climate movement can fight for the interests of the majority of people on this planet. Mythic thinking is also the best guard against a demobilizing pessimism that views the Green New Deal as a fantasy rather than a political possibility.
The problem arises, however, when adherence to a dominant narrative leads to the tailoring of plot elements to fit a favored ending. Well-plugging plays an outsized role in the administration’s just transition story merely because it conforms to the mythic storyline. Plugging abandoned wells has become a potent foreshadowing device, a supposed sign of the administration’s commitment to help labor and address the climate crisis. This kind of storymaking renders the Left vulnerable to a treacherous optimism that dresses up modest decarbonization efforts, or even counter-productive actions, as real progress.
Sorel sharply criticized political optimists for overlooking the practical demands of their projects. He complained that optimists foolishly accepted that intended outcomes would materialize without genuine effort, or else would take the wrong actions to bring about desired results. He pointed to the Reign of Terror in France, accusing those who spilt the most blood of harboring a deluded certainty about a splendorous happy ending, whatever the interim costs.
The point is not that squandering federal funding on well-plugging will engender violence or disaster. In the context of plugging abandoned wells, the consequences of taking the wrong actions may even be trivial in the grand arc of history. But the logic underpinning such decisions can be cumulatively dangerous. Any mass climate movement should take the insidiousness of mythic optimism very seriously.
For Sorel, only pessimism could break the magic spell. “Pessimism,” Sorel wrote, “is quite a different thing than the caricatures of it which are presented to us; it is a philosophy of conduct rather than a theory of the world.” As a political strategy, pessimism refuses to leave out inconvenient facts; it embraces and accommodates uncertainty. We can be empirically sensitive in our story-writing while maintaining faith in a just transition. We ought to take interest in the humble, misbehaving details living in the margins of our dominant narratives, and have the courage and creativity to include them. This involves finding holes in the plotline, and maybe plugging them.
Molly Robinson is a folklorist and environmental historian currently stationed at the College of William and Mary. She is a recent former member-organizer within UAW-2865.
Congratulations! You’ve made it to the end of a delightful article, if we may say so. You can help make more of these by donating a small amount to The Trouble. Most of your money goes directly to paying authors. None of it goes to profit or advertisers, because we are a non-profit and we don’t believe in that stuff.