Just one week after coasting to an easy victory in the Democratic primary on April 23, U.S. Rep. Summer Lee may soon earn a second win: Her colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives appear set to approve a bill she sponsored — with bipartisan support — to address the blight of abandoned oil and gas wells.
The Abandoned Well Remediation Research and Development Act would establish a five-year program at the federal Department of Energy to improve its data on the location of abandoned wells and study improved methods of capping or otherwise limiting the environmental damage they do. Speaking on the floor of the House Monday evening, Lee stressed that while the wells may be forgotten, they aren't gone.
"These abandoned wells not only contribute to the climate crisis by leaking methane, but they also expose our families to cancer-causing toxins like benzene, leave our homes vulnerable to explosive gases and lower property values, making it tougher for families to maintain and sell their homes," she said.
Such a measure has arguably been more than a century-and-a-half in the making. Some abandoned wells date back to the mid-1800s, and regulators have no clear idea of how many of them still exist. According to the bill's legislative record, estimates for the number of abandoned oil and gas wells nationwide range from 700,000 to more than 3 million.
Each one of those wells can be a source of methane — which contributes to warming global temperatures — as well as environmental toxins such as the carcinogen benzene. And they are a particular problem in Pennsylvania, where communities such as Murrysville, which Lee visited earlier this spring, saw booms in oil and natural-gas production.
Lee's position on environmental issues has long been underscored by concerns that pollution hurts low-income communities most. On Monday, Lee noted that her district — which includes the Monongahela Valley and other industrial and post-industrial areas — suffers from poor air quality and pollution.
"These communities also suffer from high rates of asthma or COPD and exposure to lead in our water," she said. "We can't leave leaky oil and gas wells from the 1800s to continue poisoning and endangering our communities. We also can't afford inaction. We must invest significant resources to research and develop solutions to this crisis by passing our bipartisan bill."
The bill, HR 4877, envisions a number of areas that federal experts could study. They include the use of new technologies to locate wells, new low-carbon materials for stopping them up, and the potential for using them in a greener approach to energy — either for geothermal power or storing carbon dioxide as a means of keeping it out of the atmosphere.
Though they've been long overlooked, the wells have attracted more attention in recent years: President Joe Biden's infrastructure bills have provided federal dollars to cap wells in two dozen states, Pennsylvania included.
But while those spending bills — and the science of climate change — have been hotly contested, Lee found bipartisan support for her measure.
Her fellow cosponsor was Oklahoma Republican Stephanie Bice, who sometimes strays from her party's line but still ranks — at least in one conservative group's estimation — as fairly conservative. Still, Oklahoma, too, is a gas-producing state with half a million wells of its own. In her own remarks Monday, Bice said some of those wells were "slowly leaking harmful gases and chemicals into the ecosystem."
Bice didn't mention the climate change concerns or environmental justice issues that animated Lee. She instead characterized the bill as a means of saving taxpayer money: The measure will "potentially save billions of dollars in future efforts" by developing new ways of handling the wells, she said. And those new technologies could mean, "We won't need another $4 billion in federal plugging programs," she added.
Bice and Lee both sit on the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, whose members unanimously backed the bill last summer. A voice vote Monday evening teed up the measure for a roll call vote that Lee's office said could come as early as Tuesday afternoon. The measure is using a fast-track process reserved for non-controversial bills, which limits debate but requires a two-thirds vote for passage.
The measure would move on to the U.S. Senate, and its passage would provide a satisfying coda to Lee's April 23 primary win.
Throughout that campaign, challenger Bhavini Patel and other critics accused her of being too ideologically strident and not open enough to compromise. But on Monday, Bice praised Lee "for working alongside me in a bipartisan fashion," and in a statement circulated by Lee's office, the state's top environmental regulator, acting Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Jessica Shirley, said state officials "appreciate this bipartisan effort to address ... protecting the health and environment of Pennsylvanians."
