The fate of the state’s abandoned oil wells may depend on the presidential election

Mike Hastings, 41, has lived in Western New York his entire life. His home, which he shares with his wife and three children, is situated on 170 acres of forested land near the town of Allegany. The property is home to a winding creek and a diverse range of wildlife, including bears, coyotes and foxes. It also contains 80 abandoned oil wells, remnants of a 19th-century drilling boom in the region.

Hastings is one of many landowners in the area dealing with unplugged wells that are leaking toxins, including methane, a potent greenhouse gas and one of the main contributors to climate change, into the atmosphere and into the groundwater. Efforts to address this kind of legacy pollution would likely take starkly different directions depending on who wins the presidential election.

Vice President Kamala Harris has said climate change is an existential threat, while Donald Trump has called climate change a “hoax.”

The Biden-Harris administration created a federal “action plan” in 2021 to reduce methane emissions from food waste, agriculture and the fossil fuel industry. In addition, the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law dedicated $4.7 billion – the largest federal investment of its kind – toward plugging abandoned wells like the ones on Hastings’ property. New York’s share of that money received to date is $50 million, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior.

“The well-capping initiative from the Biden-Harris administration is a crucial step in addressing methane gas emissions,” said Brian Smith, associate executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment, an environmental advocacy organization.

In his bid to return to the White House, Trump has vowed to boost the production of oil, natural gas and coal. The Republican Party’s platform states, “We will DRILL, BABY, DRILL and we will become Energy Independent, and even Dominant again.” At the Republican National Convention in July, Trump pledged to dismantle what he called Biden’s “meaningless green new scam ideas.” When Trump was president,his administration eliminated a rule that required oil and gas companies to find and fix methane leaks. And as part of the conservative Project 2025, which Trump has publicly disavowed, the second Trump administration could seek to overhaul the federal government’s climate change regulations.

The EPA estimates there are approximately 2 million unplugged and unproductive oil and gas wells in the U.S. Approximately 23,000 of them are in New York state, according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation. The companies that drilled these wells abandoned them after the bulk of the fossil fuels were extracted. “Capping” or “plugging” these wells is not only good for local ecosystems. It’s an important part of the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to slash U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Methane is a heat-trapping gas that is responsible for more than 25% of global warming, according to the United Nations Environment Program. Reducing methane emissions is part of the Biden-Harris strategy to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

Well capping is a long and complex process that can be extremely costly. New York has been working on this problem since 2013 under the New York Works Well Plugging Initiative. With an initial allocation of $2 million, it has completed 29 plugging projects totaling 386 abandoned wells.

But the state’s well plugging initiative created a nightmare for Hastings, who received a phone call from a state Department of Environmental Conservation staffer in April 2019 saying they would be near Hastings’ home and wanted to come and look at the documented abandoned wells on his property.

Believing the state intended to help him seal his wells, he volunteered that there were more. “Well, yes, in fact, there’s quite a few of them out there,” he said.

Following an inspection of his land, the Department of Environmental Conservation contacted the EPA, which informed Hastings that eight of the 80 wells on his property were in danger of contaminating the nearby Four Mile Creek waterway. EPA officials said that if they couldn’t determine who the original owners were, and there were no leases on file, then Hastings would be responsible for the cost of plugging the problematic wells. At more than $50,000 per well, that would’ve cost over $400,000. That was money Hastings didn’t have.

“For so long, so many people have been just stuck with these orphan wells, and states are critically underfunded and overwhelmed by the projects,” said Curtis Shuck, a retired oil executive and founder of the Well Done Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to plugging abandoned oil and gas wells.

All too often, the companies that profited from fossil fuel drilling are long gone, leaving landowners like Hastings – or taxpayers – to cover the costs.

The Biden-Harris administration is trying to change that, shifting the financial responsibility back to the fossil fuel companies that drilled these wells.It is starting with offshore oil and gas wells by reviewing them after they have been drilled, overseeing the well-plugging process and putting pressure on companies that decommission the wells to be financially responsible until the completion of the project.

New York state could receive up to $140 million of the $4.7 billion in federal funding for well capping, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior. Trump has vowed on the campaign trail to rescind unspent funds from the Biden-Harris administration’s other major climate change legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, if he becomes president again. The well capping money could be safer because both parties agreed on the infrastructure law and Trump would likely hesitate to reverse an action by his own party, said Amy Townsend-Small, a professor in the School of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Cincinnati.

In the middle of Hastings’ ordeal, when he was looking at paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to plug wells on his land and putting personal projects such as a house renovation on hold, he read an article in a local newspaper about the work Shuck’s foundation was doing in Bradford, Pennsylvania. He reached out.

Shuck, whose Well Done Foundation is funded entirely through donations and partnerships, had capped wells in 12 states but not yet in New York. He’s currently evaluating Hastings’ wells and will plug the most problematic ones for free.

Ironically, just days after Hastings spoke with Shuck, he received a voicemail from the EPA that the agency had reevaluated his wells, determined that they were not a threat to the waterway, and decided to pull out.

Nevertheless, Hastings and Shuck continue to identify which wells were emitting methane and prioritized plugging those.

“The threat of financial ruin was very real to us. My family and I spent the better part of two years in a state of confusion, anger and disbelief that the burden of something that we had absolutely nothing to do with could possibly fall on our shoulders,” Hastings said. “To say it was a relief is an understatement.”