{"id":67496,"date":"2024-04-23T16:52:15","date_gmt":"2024-04-23T21:52:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=67496"},"modified":"2024-04-23T16:52:15","modified_gmt":"2024-04-23T21:52:15","slug":"oil-companies-must-set-aside-more-money-to-plug-wells-a-new-rule-says-but-it-wont-be-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=67496","title":{"rendered":"Oil Companies Must Set Aside More Money to Plug Wells, a New Rule Says. But It Won\u2019t Be Enough."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Oil Companies Must Set Aside More Money to Plug Wells, a New Rule Says. But It Won\u2019t Be Enough.<\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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For the first time in more than 60 years, the Bureau of Land Management will force oil and gas companies to set aside more money to guarantee they plug old wells, preventing them from leaking oil, brine and toxic or climate-warming gasses.<\/p>\n

The rule,\u00a0finalized this month<\/a>, comes at a critical time. Money previously set aside to clean up wells on federal land would have covered the cost of fewer than 1 out of 100, according to\u00a0the government\u2019s own estimates<\/a>, and the vast majority of the country\u2019s wells sit inactive or barely producing, meaning they\u2019ll soon need to be plugged.<\/p>\n

But the federal agency\u2019s work falls short of protecting taxpayers from the oil industry\u2019s cleanup costs, according to a ProPublica and Capital & Main review of contracts or other cost estimates at tens of thousands of wells across the country. While the updated rule will shrink the gap between companies\u2019 financial guarantees to plug wells, known as bonds, and the cost of the work, it still leaves a significant shortfall.<\/p>\n

One math error alone leaves taxpayers on the hook for roughly $400 million more than they should be. A Bureau of Land Management employee\u2019s arithmetic mistake yielded an incorrect average cleanup cost for wells that the agency has plugged, largely at taxpayer expense. That artificially low cost estimate became the foundation of the new bonding requirements.<\/p>\n

When ProPublica and Capital & Main pointed out the error in December, and that it could potentially cost taxpayers \u2014 and save oil companies \u2014 hundreds of millions of dollars when multiplied across the many thousands of wells the new rule would touch, the agency downplayed the miscalculation.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oil Companies Must Set Aside More Money to Plug Wells, a New Rule Says. But It Won\u2019t Be Enough. For the first time in more than 60 years, the Bureau of Land Management will force oil and gas companies to set aside more money to guarantee they plug old wells, preventing them from leaking oil, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[4379,34315,33833,34314,1729,12960,34316],"class_list":["post-67496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-environment","tag-bureau-of-land-management","tag-capital-main","tag-mark-olalde","tag-nick-bowlin","tag-oil-and-gas-industry","tag-propublica","tag-wells"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67496"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67497,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67496\/revisions\/67497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}