HARRISBURG — As Pennsylvania celebrates plugging 300 abandoned oil and gas wells since 2023, ongoing lawsuits against the Trump administration over hundreds of millions of federal dollars are creating uncertainty for those doing the work on the ground.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, one of the Biden administration’s signature policy achievements, set aside $4.7 billion to plug orphaned wells, which can leak methane — a powerful greenhouse gas that fuels climate change — into the atmosphere.
Pennsylvania could receive as much as $400 million over the next decade.
That money was caught up in one of the first significant acts of President Donald Trump’s second term, when he ordered federal agencies to stop disbursing funds appropriated under the IIJA and the Inflation Reduction Act, at least temporarily, as part of a blanket effort at “terminating the Green New Deal.”
In a follow-up memo, the administration attempted to clarify it was targeting a smaller pool of funding, though its exact goal remained unclear.
However, Gov. Josh Shapiro’s administration said more than $400 million in well-related funds were among those that were “frozen or restricted,” along with other money for things like mine reclamation, pollution reduction, and weatherization.
The administration filed a lawsuit challenging the freeze, saying that the commonwealth was “entirely unable to access $1.2 billion in federal funding, with an additional $900 million requiring an undefined review by federal agencies before it can be drawn down.”
There haven’t been any orders issued in Shapiro’s case, but similar lawsuits have yielded injunctions, and Pennsylvania’s money is currently unfrozen. However, Shapiro’s suit is ongoing “until we obtain a final judgment or binding agreement requiring the Trump Administration to comply with its legal obligations,” his spokesperson told the Capital-Star in February.
As these lawsuits play out, contractors on the ground who plug these wells say the uncertainty makes it extremely difficult to staff up and invest in equipment effectively.
Luke Plants, who owns Bradford-based plugging company Plants and Goodwin, told Spotlight PA he’s hired people to meet a Biden-era requirement to measure methane reduction.
“What we're hearing under the Trump administration is that maybe all the methane requirements are going to go out the window,” he said. “And so it's just sort of like a total zigzag that's going on. You scale up and you prepare for one standard, and then the standard goes an entirely different way.”
“It just makes things very unpredictable and very uncertain,” he added.
For decades, Pennsylvania has struggled to remediate its tens of thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells, which serve as a reminder of the commonwealth’s long history of resource extraction.
Once wells are tapped out, drilling companies are supposed to plug them so they don’t leak methane, let toxic substances flow into groundwater, allow people to fall in, or some combination of all of those risks. But plugging a well is expensive, and over the years, many companies have neglected to do it.
The wells they left behind are now abandoned or orphaned. The state can’t figure out who owns them, or the companies that dug them either can’t afford to fill them or no longer exist.
When the commonwealth applied for federal funds in 2021, it reported nearly 27,000 abandoned or orphaned wells — by far the most of any state. The real number is likely much higher. A state agency estimates that there could be over 300,000 in total, and some academics say the number could be as high as 750,000.
Pennsylvania got its initial $25 million grant in August 2022, and that federal money allowed it to quickly begin making a real dent in its well problem.
In the decade before receiving those funds, the state plugged 165 wells. In less than three years, Shapiro says the state has plugged 300 wells.
“Every time we plug a well, we're doing right by public health, right by public safety, right by our farmers, right by our workers, and right by our communities,” Shapiro said at a recent news conference in Washington County. “And we're going to keep at it.”
He added that, in addition to the lawsuit, he spoke directly to Trump administration officials to make the case for unfreezing the federal money.
“I said, you know, ‘These are communities that had your back, Mr. President. These are communities that supported you. And unfortunately, this funding that you're cutting, this funding that you're freezing, is actually hurting those communities,’” Shapiro said. “Next day, they unfroze the money, and we got back to work and made sure that this work continues.”
(The White House has denied Shapiro’s advocacy played a role, per The Inquirer.)
Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection, which works with both federal officials and pluggers on remediation efforts, did not respond to a request for comment on the likely long-term impact of the ongoing litigation over the funding freeze, or about the uncertainty that pluggers like Plants are facing.
Plants is looking for information wherever he can as he tries to make the right investments for his business. He talks to state representatives and tries to keep in touch with people at the U.S. Department of the Interior, which sets environmental regulations for the funding.
His questions are basic, things like: If new funding comes in, will he still have to measure methane emissions?
“Do you keep all of these bodies on the payroll?” he asked. “Do you keep training more individuals to do this work? Or do you not, because it's kind of a waste of capital at the moment to do that?”
His company has a lot riding on public projects. He estimated that Plants and Goodwin got about a quarter of the 14 contracts that Pennsylvania issued using federal money, and he is hoping for many more.
He told Spotlight PA last year that he “purposefully scaled up in 2022 knowing that 2023 would be when the money hit the state bank account.”
Now, he said, he needs to make sure the people he hires will have work to do. These jobs are specialized, he noted. Trade schools don’t usually teach about decommissioning wells, so he has to train people in-house, and that takes time and resources.
“You really want to know that there's projects that are going to be there at the end of that six months to get that person gainfully employed and not have to basically downsize again,” he said. “Having predictable levels of demand is a very big deal. It’s something that definitely keeps me up at night.”
