Pa. to Start Apprenticeship for Abandoned Well Plugging

The state and the United Mine Workers of America are working together to provide a new registered apprenticeship program to train workers to plug abandoned oil and gas wells.

The recently announced program will help workers, including displaced coal miners, train for in-demand jobs, while at the same time helping to clean up a major problem across the state that presents environmental and public health risks.

Abandoned and orphaned oil and gas wells are a big problem for Pennsylvania and neighboring states. Pennsylvania has a long history of oil and gas drilling, including the first commercial oil well in 1859. Many conventional wells were drilled long before the state began regulating the industry, and some of these were simply abandoned when they stopped producing oil or gas. Abandoned wells can vent methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and volatile organic compounds into the atmosphere and contaminate groundwater.

Although owners and operators are legally responsible for plugging wells when oil and gas production ends, this does not always happen. Many of the 8,700 known wells in Pennsylvania’s database are so-called conventional “legacy wells”.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates there are 3.2 million abandoned oil and gas wells across the U.S., and in Pennsylvania there could be as many as 350,000. At a conservative cost of $33,000 to plug an abandoned well, DEP’s liability ranges between $280 million to several billion, while plugging costs continue to increase and can be much more.

The federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act provided billions for states to address the abandoned well problem. Pennsylvania has already received $25 million, and is expected to receive as much as $400 million in the coming decade to plug wells. The state Department of Environmental Protection has had to rapidly ramp up its well-plugging program, which before the influx of funding could plug only a handful of wells each year.

Finding enough qualified crews has proved to be a problem however. The state earlier this year celebrated plugging its 200th well using the federal funds, but wants to plug even more. The development of the apprenticeship program could provide an additional trained workforce to further speed up the process. At the same time, the program can serve as a retraining program for workers in rural areas who have lost their jobs when mines closed due to the transition away from coal.

The Gas Well Capping Technician Program will operate from the UMWA’s Ruff Creek Training Center in Greene County. A release provided no specifics on the length of the program or when training will begin, but it may offer a way to put more workers in the field qualified to address this problem.