A real effort to deal with orphaned oil and gas wells

If Big Filthy Fossil Fuels had any measure of responsibility or integrity, they'd pick up the tab. But, yeah, that's a laugh.

The Biden administration has awarded $560 million to plug orphaned oil and gas wells across 24 states, the largest single investment in oil field cleanup in history, officials said (August 25).

The funding is part of a $4.7 billion orphaned well program greenlighted by last year’s Infrastructure, Investment and Jobs Act. The bipartisan program offers grant dollars to qualifying states to pay for finding abandoned wells, tracking their methane releases, plugging them to stem polluting gases and restoring the land at the surface...

All told, states have flagged more than 10,000 high priority wells for cleanup, the first in line of a nearly 130,000 backlog of unreclaimed known well sites, Interior reported...That number is expected to rise as federal funds bolster state efforts to identify hidden or lost orphans. - E&E News