The methane that is quietly oozing from abandoned oil and gas wells in the United States is invisible and odorless—yet it has the ability to wreak havoc on the climate in a major way. Compared to CO2, methane is a much more potent climate gas. It exhibits 25-80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide in addition to acting faster....
The Biden administration on Monday announced it will send $1.15 billion to states to plug thousands of orphan oil and gas wells that emit methane, a potent climate-changing greenhouse gas....
$4.7 billion released by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has states rethinking their abandoned oil well tallies....
In January, the Department of the Interior stated what many have suspected: there are far more orphaned oil and gas wells in the U.S. than previously estimated. In a memo, the agency wrote that more than 130,000 documented wells exist across the country that lack a responsible company on the hook to pay for cleanup – the remnant of more than 150 years of extracting oil and natural gas. This...
The Interior Department has signed an agreement with several other federal agencies to organize its nationwide effort to clean up orphaned oil and gas wells....
The Biden administration on Wednesday said more than half of U.S. states intend to apply for a portion of the $4.7 billion carved out in the new infrastructure law for cleaning up abandoned oil and gas wells....
For decades, Pennsylvania has barely made a dent in stopping pollution from hundreds of thousands of abandoned or orphaned oil and gas wells. Now, the state may soon receive nearly $400 million to tackle one of its most insidious legacy pollution problems....
In the public conversation about climate change, methane has gotten too little attention for too long. Many people may be unaware that humans have been spewing a greenhouse gas that’s even more potent than carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a rate not seen in at least 800,000 years. It harms air quality and comes from sources as varied as oil and gas pipelines to landfills and cows. But methane...
Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) took an important step forward to advance President Biden’s commitment to action on climate change and protect people’s health by proposing comprehensive new protections to sharply reduce pollution from the oil and natural gas industry – including, for the first time, reductions from existing sources nationwide. The proposed new Clean Air Act rule would lead to significant, cost-effective reductions in methane emissions and other health-harming air pollutants that endanger nearby...
More than 100 countries have signed the Global Methane Pledge, which requires a 30 percent cut in methane emissions by 2030, one of the Biden administration’s priorities for the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland. The pledge’s signatories now represent nearly half of human-caused methane emissions....