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West Virginia is sitting on a growing economic and environmental problem: tens of thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells that state regulators have failed to track, inspect, or require companies to clean up.
Weak enforcement, outdated rules, and inadequate funding have allowed the problem to spiral, but a large-scale, well-funded cleanup effort could support more than 2,800 job-years over the next two decades.
Altogether, West Virginia has an estimated 50,000 abandoned oil and gas wells, many of them leaking methane, polluting soil and water, and lowering nearby property values. The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection’s under-resourced Office of Oil and Gas employs one inspector for every 6,700 wells, a ratio that has set regulators up for failure. The number of inspectors and the frequency of well inspections and violation notices have declined since the mid-1980s as the rate of well abandonment continues to accelerate. Meanwhile, regulators have largely abandoned attempts to enforce plugging requirements for non-producing wells due to high decommissioning costs, instead negotiating voluntary, long-term consent agreements with well owners.
Before drilling a well, operators are required to purchase bonds or other financial assurance to help cover the cost of plugging the well at the end of its producing life. But “blanket” bonding amounts for conventional wells have remained at $50,000 for more than forty years, representing a fraction of the average cost to decommission a single well. Since bonds are rarely forfeited, usually only when an operator becomes insolvent, bonding does little to incentivize plugging of abandoned wells. For operators, paying a small bonding premium is far less expensive than spending millions to plug their wells, especially when the state lacks the resources and willingness to pursue rigorous enforcement.
To address the state’s past, present and future abandoned wells, state policymakers will need to ensure operators pre-fund the decommissioning of their wells, ideally by instituting a production fee proportional to real-world decommissioning costs. Decision-makers should look to the bipartisan Orphan Well Prevention Act of 2025, which outlines a production fee and requires oil and gas operators to set aside funds to decommission wells as they are completed for production, as a model for improving enforcement of abandoned well laws. On top of ensuring that thousands of wells are decommissioned, it would also boost the economy of the state by keeping more money in the state’s local economy and employing more workers in the oil and gas industry.
Remaining Initial Grants funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act could decommission 1,393 orphaned wells through 2031, supporting an estimated 810 total job-years. If West Virginia pursued a new program to decommission an additional 4,000 orphaned wells from 2032 to 2041, it is estimated that it would create more than 2,000 job-years or 207 jobs per year over the ten year period.