By Anthony Hennen | The Center Square
(The Center Square) – Pennsylvania has abandoned mines across the Commonwealth, and the federal government is sending $26 million for reclamation efforts, Sen. Bob Casey, D-PA, announced.
The money comes on top of $244 million in funding announced in February.
“Across the Commonwealth, communities experience the legacy of abandoned mines, from property damage to polluted waterways to poor health for generations. This funding is vital to restoring the health of those communities,” Casey said. “Thanks to the infrastructure law, Pennsylvania will also receive more than $244 million to clean up dangerous sites, improve water quality damaged by acid mine drainage, create new jobs and revitalize economies. I will continue fighting to bring infrastructure funding to Pennsylvania to ensure we can address pollution and water quality.”
While $26 million may not sound like much for abandoned mine reclamation efforts, the scale of the problem is so large that any funding helps.
As previously reported by The Center Square, the state government estimated about 27,000 wells need remediation, at a cost of $1.8 billion. The long history of gas, oil, and coal exploitation in Pennsylvania has meant that many sites were abandoned without proper cleanup or preservation efforts.
Pennsylvania plugged six wells in 2018, nine in 2019 and 18 in 2020. The cost of the work in 2020 totaled $1.5 million, including restoration, The Center Square reported. Plugging wells and reclaiming mine lands isn’t a simple matter, either. Many sites aren’t mapped out or in any centralized registry. Scattered across Pennsylvania, the administrative work to find, map, and rehabilitate them makes it a complicated process.
The problem isn’t one of simply addressing past unplugged wells, either. Since 2016, 256 conventional oil and gas companies have received about 4,300 notices of violation for abandoning oil and gas wells without plugging them, noted David E. Hess, former secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.
“The thousands of newly abandoned wells become the responsibility of taxpayers to plug in the absence of any follow-up enforcement actions or agreements,” Hess wrote. “The thousands of new abandoned conventional oil and gas wells represent a potential taxpayer liability of over $100 million, even if just half of them remain unplugged – given the average cost to safely plug a well is about $33,000.”
Past liabilities are an inherited problem, but if the General Assembly can’t ensure that the liability for environmental damage falls on oil and gas companies, it will eventually fall on the taxpayer.