The legislation would authorize the U.S. Department of Energy to establish a five-year program to improve the location data it has on abandoned wells — some 350,000 of which are believed to be unaccounted for in Pennsylvania alone. The post U.S. House passes Summer Lee bill to find and deal with abandoned oil and gas wells appeared first on Pennsylvania Capital-Star.
Rep. Summer Lee said without this bill, it will remain nearly impossible to locate every abandoned well and it will be too expensive to plug or remediate them.
Efforts to plug abandoned gas and oil wells — a persistent issue in Western Pennsylvania, where they leak copious amounts of methane — could see increased attention thanks to a bill that passed in the U.S. House on Monday. The Abandoned Well Remediation Research and Development Act seeks to improve
When Pamela Schrank’s family moved into their Murrysville home last May, she was told an old gas well at the edge of some woods on their property had been capped. That wasn’t the case, according to state environmental officials — a fact Schrank found out last fall when she was