Plan To Plug 1,600 Wells In PA's Only National Forest Bogs Down In Blown Deadlines, Missing Money

[hatrack]

Even the people who believed in the scheme from the beginning called it a long shot. The partnership — between a Canadian businessman who thought he could make good and make money off the oil and gas industry’s environmental problems, and a massive abandoned oil field operation in the Allegheny National Forest — has been through six years of false starts.

Now Glenn Vanderlinden, an Ontario resident and owner of AquaPower Holdings, faces a federal arrest warrant if he comes into the U.S. But Resources Preservation, the McKean County company responsible for plugging or reviving some 1,600 abandoned wells, says it cannot proceed without him.

Many of the companies that drilled those wells no longer exist and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection must strike a balance between making current owners pay to decommission their wells and driving them into bankruptcy under the weight of environmental liabilities. That’s where regulators find themselves today, as Resources Preservation, formerly called ARG Resources, has made almost no progress in the 15 months since it, AquaPower and the DEP signed an agreement outlining how Resources Preservation would begin to comply with its cleanup obligations. Its abandoned wells, pipelines and buildings in the Highland Field in Elk County occupy roughly 10,000 acres of Pennsylvania’s only national forest, where it has operated for two decades and produced — by DEP's estimate — $225 million worth of oil and gas.

EDIT

At various points over the past decade, it seemed that Mr. Vanderlinden was building an empire with the bones of Pennsylvania’s legacy of extraction in the heart of its booming shale gas industry. He was going to buy a decommissioned power plant in Clearfield County. And a wastewater treatment facility attached to it. Then he had plans to invest in a frack sand mine and haul sand in one direction then load the empty trains with salt for the return trip. There were plans to mix coal fly ash into concrete that oil and gas companies could use to build new roads and well pads, an idea that he says came from his now estranged business partner. Then they could collect the frack water coming out of those shale wells and turn it into road salt and drilling additives. Some of the leftover waste could be used to plug Pennsylvania’s growing inventory of old, sometimes leaking oil and gas wells.

EDIT

https://www.post-gazette.com/business/powersource/2021/05/02/A-project-to-plug-1-600-wells-is-almost-ready-to-launch-and-has-been-for-six-years/stories/202105020101

[hunter]

1. Properly plugging a well is almost as difficult as drilling a new well.

New and reworked wells ought to be taxed heavily to fund the proper closing of abandoned wells.

If we choose to "save the world" eventually ALL oil and gas fields will be abandoned sooner rather than later.

[Finishline42]

2. Agree something needs to be done

because the typical method of starting these ventures is with a LLC that is folded when the revenue steam dies.

Taxing what is produced from a well that goes directly into a fund that pays for the decommissioning sure makes a lot of sense.