Holding corporations accountable for ‘zombie wells’

Fossil fuel corporations have left a haunting legacy of over two million polluting abandoned oil and gas wells across the United States. These ‘zombie wells’ – wells that continue to pollute the planet long after they have stopped being used to produce oil or gas – are a disaster for the climate, bad for human health, and a fraud on American taxpayers.

Zombie wells emit methane – a toxic gas more than 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at warming the planet – at 100 times the rate of oil and gas wells that have been plugged. In 2021 alone, abandoned oil and gas wells spewed more than 295,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere, the carbon equivalent of the annual emissions of 1.8 million cars on the road.

Experts estimate that methane pollution is responsible for up to 30% of the current human-induced global warming that is overheating our planet and causing extreme weather events such as heatwaves, floods and forest fires.

These wells are a threat to human health too. Wells are often abandoned on people’s property or in their communities. The methane pollution from the well forms ozone which is linked to serious health issues and premature deaths for people nearby. Lower-income communities and communities of color bear the brunt of this pollution as they are disproportionately likely to live near oil and gas infrastructure.

How did we get here?

When a fossil fuel company stops extracting oil or gas from a well because the well has stopped producing, it has a legal responsibility to ‘plug’ the well to ensure it doesn’t pollute.

Oil and gas companies have abandoned 3.7 million oil and gas wells across the US as the wells began to run dry. However, the majority of them - 2.1 million - have not been plugged. Our lawsuit alleges this is because fossil fuel companies have skipped out on their responsibility to clean up after themselves.

Instead of plugging the wells, at an average clean-up cost of $100,000 per well, the industry’s largest players systematically transfer these wells to smaller, private companies that are destined to go bankrupt or dissolve, leaving no one to pay for the clean-up. The well becomes an ‘orphan’, the responsibility falls to the state, the financial costs land on the taxpayer, and the climate disruption impacts all of us.

Our case

That’s why we’re litigating a new class action case to hold oil and gas companies accountable. We’re representing a group of Coloradans who have been directly affected by oil and gas companies that have abandoned wells on their properties without cleaning them up and making them safe.

Through a series of transfers, the wells on their properties were shuffled from major oil and gas corporations such as Chevron (via its acquired entity Noble) down through other fossil fuel companies before eventually ending up in the hands of a smaller, private company that subsequently went bankrupt, leaving the landowners with a polluting well on their land and no one responsible for plugging it and making it safe.

What could the impact of this lawsuit be?

If our court action is successful, it will establish that the clean-up costs of plugging these wells can go back up the chain of ownership to a solvent company that previously owned the well.

This will not only result in the long-overdue plugging of hundreds of wells covered by this case in Colorado. Should the court validate this right, communities burdened with abandoned wells nationwide would have a new avenue for pursuing oil and gas companies for clean-up costs amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars.

That legal remedy has the potential to stop this zombie wells menace that threatens our climate, pollutes air and water, victimizes local communities – and sticks American taxpayers with a bill for billions of dollars.

And this is urgent. There are millions of active oil and gas wells across the United States that will run dry over the next decade. Unless we can use the law to force fossil fuel companies to clean up after themselves, many more will be abandoned – intensifying the climate crisis and sticking taxpayers with an ever-increasing bill.

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