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In the dusty light of a decades-old lunch counter in Lewisville, Arkansas, Chantell Dunbar-Jones expressed optimism at what the lithium boom coming to this stretch of the state will mean for her hometown. She sees jobs, economic development, and a measure of prosperity returning to a region that needs them. After waving to a gaggle of children crossing the street in honey-colored afternoon sunshine, the city council member assessed the future as best she could. “Not to say that everything’s perfect, but I feel like the positives way outweigh the negative,” she said.

Lewisville sits in the southwest corner of the state, squarely atop the Smackover Formation, a limestone aquifer that stretches from northeast Texas to the Gulf Coast of Florida and has for 100 years spurted oil and natural gas. The petroleum industry boomed here in the 1920s and peaked again in the 1960s before declining to a steady trickle over the decades that followed. But the Smackover has more to give. The brine and bromine pooled 10,000 feet below the surface contains lithium, a critical component in the batteries needed to move beyond fossil fuels.

Exxon Mobil is among at least four companies lining up to draw it from the earth. It opened a test site not far from Lewisville late last year and plans to extract enough of the metal to produce 100,000 electric vehicle batteries by 2026 and 1 million by 2030. Another company, Standard Lithium, believes its leases may hold 1.8 million metric tons of the material and will spend $1.3 billion building a processing facility to handle it all. All of this has Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders predicting that her state will become the nation’s leading lithium producer. 

With so much money to be made, Dunbar-Jones and other public officials find themselves being courted by extraction company executives eager to tell them what all of this could mean for the people and places they lead. They have been hosting town meetings, promising to build lasting, mutually beneficial relationships with the communities and residents of the area. So far, Dunbar-Jones and many others are optimistic. They see a looming renaissance, even as other community members acknowledge the mixed legacies of those who earn their money pulling resources from the ground. Such companies provide livelihoods, but only as long as there is something to extract, and they often leave pollution in their wake. 

The companies eyeing the riches buried beneath the pine forests and bayous promise plenty of jobs and opportunities, and paint themselves as responsible stewards of the environment. But drawing brine to the surface is a water-intensive process, and similar operations in Nevada aren’t expected to create more than a few hundred permanent jobs. It’s high-paying work, but often requires advanced degrees many in this region don’t possess. Looking beyond the employment question, some local residents are wary of the companies looking to lease their land for lithium. It brings to mind memories of the unscrupulous and shady dealings common during the oil boom of a century ago.

For residents of Lewisville, which is majority Black, such concerns are set against a broader history of bigotry and the fact that even as other towns prospered, they have long been the last to benefit from promises of the sort being made these days. Folks throughout the area are quick to note that the wealth that flowed from the oil fields their parents and grandparents worked benefited some more than others, even as they lived with the ecological devastation that industry left behind.

Dunbar-Jones is confident that, if nothing else, concern about their reputation and a need to ensure cordial relations with community leaders will sway lithium companies into supporting local needs. “All I can say is right now it’s up in the air as to what they will do,” she said, “but it seems promising.” 

Lewisville sits just west of Magnolia, El Dorado, and Camden, three cities that outline the “golden triangle” region that prospered after the discovery of oil in 1920. In an area long dependent upon timber, the plantation economy transformed almost instantly as tenant farmers, itinerant prospectors, and small landholders became rich. Within five years, 3,483 wells dotted the land, and Arkansas was producing 73 million barrels annually. 

Although the boom created great wealth, Lewisville remained largely rural, and its residents labored in the fields that made others rich. Still, the oil economy, coupled with the timber industry, brought a rush of saloons, itinerant workers, and hotels to many towns. Restaurants, supermarkets, and other trappings of a middle-class community soon followed, though Lewisville always lagged a bit behind.

That prosperity lasted a bit longer than the oil did. The first wells ran dry by the end of the 1920s, but the Smackover continued producing 20 to 30 million barrels annually until 1967, when it began a steady decline. These days, it offers about 4.4 million a year.

The shops that once served Lewisville and the furniture and feed factories that employed those who didn’t work the fields have long since gone. Jana Crank, who has lived here for 58 years, came of age in the 1960s and remembers prosperous times. She runs a community gallery in what’s left of downtown, where most buildings sport faded paint and cracked windows. “It used to be a TV fix-it shop,” Crank, a retired high school art teacher, said of the space.

As she spoke, a group of friends painted quietly. Canvases showing sunsets, crosses, and landscapes lined the walls. The scenes, bright and cheerful, stood in contrast to Lewisville, where retailers have moved on, the hospital has closed, and the schools have been consolidated to save money. Fewer than 900 people live here, about half as many as during the town’s peak in the 1970s. They tend to be older, with a median household income of around $30,000. “People are just dying out, their children don’t even live in town,” Crank said. “They have nothing to come back for.” 

That could change. Jobs associated with mining rare-earth minerals are highly compensated and highly sought-after, many of them netting as much as $92,000 per year. State Commerce Secretary Hugh McDonald believes the state could provide 15% of the world’s lithium needs, and Sanders has said Arkansas is “moving at breakneck speed to become the lithium capital of America.”

A few steps in that direction already have been taken around Lewisville, the county seat of Lafayette County. It is home to 13 lithium test wells, the most in the region. They’re tucked away behind pine trees, fields of cattle, and, occasionally, homes. The dirt and gravel roads leading to them have been churned to slurry by heavy equipment.

Those who own and work the wells arrived quietly last year, their presence indicated by the increasing number of trucks with plates from nearby Texas and Louisiana, sparking rumors throughout the region. They officially announced themselves to Mayor Ethan Dunbar last fall, in visits to local officials, mostly county leaders, to initiate friendly relations and establish the basis for economic partnerships. Mayor Dunbar and the Lewisville City Council were invited to a public meeting where lithium company executives discussed their plans and took questions.  

The town’s motto is “Building Community Pride,” something Dunbar-Jones, who is the mayor’s sister, takes seriously. She and others have hosted movie nights, community dinners, and, in a particular point of pride, clinics to help people convicted of crimes get their records expunged. Meanwhile, the city council, joined by a number of residents, has come together to nail down just what the lithium boom will mean for the town and to ensure everyone knows what’s in store. 

That’s particularly important, Dunbar-Jones said, because 60% of the town’s residents are Black. “Typically in minority neighborhoods, people are not as aware of what’s going on, because the information just doesn’t trickle down to them the way it does to other people,” she said. “At the meetings with the actual lithium companies, there may be a handful of people of color there versus others. So that lets you know who’s getting that information.”

A representative of Exxon, the only company that responded to a request for comment, said it has strived to build ties with communities throughout the region. “We connect early and often with elected officials, community members and local leaders to have meaningful conversations, provide transparency, and find ways to give back,” the representative said. It has opened a community liaison office in Magnolia and has worked with the city’s Chamber of Commerce to sponsor community events. It also established a $100,000 endowment for Columbia and Lafayette counties to provide grants for “education, public safety, and quality-of-life initiatives.”

Folks in Lewisville would like to see more of that kind of attention. In March, the city, working with the University of Arkansas Hope-Texarkana, hosted a town hall meeting so residents could speak to lithium executives and express concerns. The mayor recalls it drawing a standing room-only crowd that expressed hope that the industry would bring jobs and revenue to town, but also worried about the environmental impact. Folks called on Exxon and other companies to support new housing and establish pathways for young people to work in the industry. 

Venesha Sasser, who at 29 is the chief development officer of the local telephone company, sees the coming boom providing an opportunity to build generational wealth for families and resources, like broadband internet access, for communities. Any company that can invest $4 billion in a lithium operation can surely afford to toss a little back, Sasser said. “We want to make sure that whoever is investing in our community, and who we are investing in, actually means our people good.”

Sasser followed a trajectory common among young Black professionals from the area: She left to pursue an education, then returned to care for loved ones. As she got more involved in the community, she often found herself being treated a little differently, an experience Mayor Dunbar delicately described as bumping up against “old systems.” Lewisville is a majority-Black town in a majority-White county, and as of 2022, had a poverty rate of 23%. Although community leaders say they work well with colleagues in other towns and with county leaders, they also feel that they’ve had to elbow their way into conversations with lithium companies. They worry that the dynamics of the oil days, when Black men worked alongside whites but often in lower-paying, less desirable jobs and most of the money stayed in wealthier cities like El Dorado, will repeat themselves.

“You had people from Magnolia and El Dorado and Spring Hill and other places coming in and doing the work and reaping the benefits, and then when it was gone, they were gone,” said Virginia Henry, a retired school teacher who grew up in Lewisville and lives in Little Rock. Her ex-husband drilled for oil years ago, and the experience left her with a sour taste in her mouth. “I’m thinking it’s going to be pretty much the same,” she said. “They’re going to ease in, they want to do all this work and create all these jobs for somebody and then ease out when it’s done in a few years. Then here we’ll be with soil that can’t grow anything, contaminated water, and a whole bunch of kids with asthma.”

Mayor Dunbar, who is midway through his second term, is trying to balance reservations with optimism. “‘Imagine the possibilities.’ That’s my tagline,” he said, settling into a chair at City Hall. A blackboard behind him outlined his priorities: housing, recreation, education. He hopes support from companies like Tetra Technologies, which is developing a 6,138-acre project not far away, will finance those goals and give people a future that’s more stable than the past, one in which Lewisville’s children can pursue the same opportunities that kids in nearby, better-resourced communities can. 

“Think about Albemarle in Magnolia,” he said, referring to the bromine plant about 30 miles up the road. “Get a job at Albemarle, you stay there 25 years, you earn a decent salary, you’d have a decent retirement. You can live well. Quality of life is good. We are hoping to see the same thing here.” 

Many of the people poised to benefit from the lithium beneath their feet seem ambivalent about climate change. In El Dorado, in a bar called The Mink Eye, an oil refinery worker grimaced at the mention of electric vehicles. The next morning, retired oil workers gathered at Johnny B’s Grill scoffed at the idea of a boom. A waitress admitted that she’d bought stock in lithium companies, but said any faith that the industry will bring renewed prosperity does not necessarily mean folks are on board with the green transition. “These men drive diesels,” she said, pointing toward her customers. Still, she said, any jobs are good jobs.

That attitude pervades the state capitol in Little Rock, where politicians who don’t give much thought to why the energy transition is necessary cheer the state’s emerging role in it. The governor, who has cast doubt on human-caused climate change, has appeared at industry events like the Arkansas Lithium Innovation Summit to proclaim the state “bullish” on its reserves of the element. “We all knew that towns like El Dorado and Smackover were built by oil and gas,” Sanders told the audience. “But who knew that our quiet brine and bromine industry had the potential to change the world.”

Much of the world’s lithium is blasted out of rocks or drawn from brine left to evaporate in vast pools, leaving behind toxic residue. The companies descending on Arkansas plan to use a more sustainable method called direct lithium extraction, or DLE. It seems to be a bit more ecologically friendly and much less water-intensive than the massive pit mines or vast evaporation ponds often found in South America. It essentially pumps water into the aquifer, filters the lithium from the extracted brine, then returns it to the aquifer in what advocates call a largely closed system. Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, in a report prepared for the Nature Conservancy, said that “DLE appears to offer the lowest impacts of available extraction technologies.”

Still, the technology is relatively new. According to Yale Environment 360, Arkansas provides a suitable proving ground for the approach because it has abundant water, a large concentration of lithium, and an established network of wells, pipelines, and refineries. But there are concerns about the amount of water required and the waste material left behind, despite repeated assurances from lithium companies that the process is safe and sustainable.

Although DLE doesn’t require as much water as brine evaporation, in which that water is lost, “it is a freshwater consumption source,” Patrick Donnelly, of the Center for Biological Diversity, said in an interview with KUAF radio in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The waste generated by the process is another concern, he said, “in particular, a solid waste stream. It’s impossible for them to extract only the lithium.”  

Locals are well aware of the impact brine can have on the land. Before anyone realized its value, oil and gas producers didn’t worry much about it leaking or spilling onto the ground, literally salting the earth. Some are concerned that the pipelines that will carry brine to refineries might leak, as they did in the oil days. Such fears are compounded by the fact the state Department of Environmental Quality relies on individuals to report problems and doesn’t appear to do much outreach to residents.

There’s also a lot of skepticism about how many jobs the boom may create. So far, Standard Lithium’s plant in El Dorado employs 91 people, said Douglas Zollner, who works with the Arkansas branch of the Nature Conservancy and has toured the facility. No one’s offered any projections on how many people might find work in the budding industry, but a lithium boom in Nevada suggests it may not be all that many. Construction of the Thacker Pass mine, which could produce 80,000 metric tons of lithium annually, is expected to generate 1,500 temporary construction and other jobs — but it will only employ 300 once operational.

Those jobs pay well, but typically require advanced training. Public universities like Arkansas Tech University are revising science and engineering curricula to meet the lithium industry’s needs, hoping to connect students with internships in the field. However, locals worry that disinvestment in schools in rural and largely Black communities will leave those who most need these jobs unable to attain the training necessary to land them.

Just how much money might flow into local communities remains another open question. Fossil fuel companies lease the land they drill and pay landowners royalties of 16.67% of their profit. Any oil pumped from the land also is taxed at 4 to 5% of its market value. This fee, called severance tax, is paid to the counties or towns from which the resource was extracted. 

None of these things apply to lithium. So far, there is no severance tax on the metal, though the state levies a tax of $2.75 for every 1,000 barrels of the brine from which it is extracted. The state Oil and Gas Commission continues haggling over a royalty rate, though it seems unlikely the fee will be as high as those paid on oil and gas leases. When the state sought a double-digit royalty, the industry balked, arguing that extracting and processing lithium is expensive and officials ought to wait until production begins in earnest before deciding what’s fair. 

Companies cannot extract and sell the metal for commercial use until the commission sets a royalty rate, a process expected to drag on for some time. On July 26, the major players in the Arkansas lithium industry filed a joint application seeking a rate of 1.82%. The South Arkansas Mineral Association — which represents the majority of landowners, which is to say, timber companies, oil companies, and other corporate interests — demanded a higher share. 

Small landowners still hope to benefit, and the lack of clarity around royalties hasn’t done much to engender trust among locals wary of the companies looking to lease their land. Some folks, already offered terms, are using online forums to determine if they’re being stiffed. Others fear efforts to wrest land from the few Black families who own property, often passed between generations informally without a deed or title. Such land, called heirs’ property, accounts for more than one-third of Black-owned property in the South, and without the documentation required to prove ownership, land can be subject to court-ordered sales. 

Many in Lewisville say they regularly receive calls and texts from people interested in buying land, and Henry has seen people checking out properties and attending auctions. During a visit to the Lafayette County courthouse archives, I noticed a woman thumbing through mineral rights records. Although she wouldn’t identify herself, she politely explained that she was checking such documents throughout Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana, bringing to mind the speculators who, during the oil boom, did the same before approaching naive residents who may not know about the riches under their land. 

Beyond the timber companies with holdings in the region, most of the major landowners are white and wealthy, and any spoils, Henry suspects, will simply pass from one affluent family or powerful company to another, with no benefit to people like her. “What land, honey?” she said with a small, sardonic laugh. “That’s a pie in the sky type dream to me.”

Despite the concerns, the hype and fanfare surrounding the possibility of an economic revival remains high. City officials in Lewisville, and the people they lead, are trying to remain open-minded and easygoing even if unanswered questions linger about how many jobs might be coming, how the boom will benefit their town, and what it will mean for the environment.

“You know, it’s kind of frustrating because the questions get asked at these meetings,” Dunbar, the mayor, said. But he feels the lithium companies often meet questions with the same pleasant, if unhelpful, answer of “We can’t talk about it.” They’re always so careful in their responses. “They deliberately did not say anything until they knew what they wanted to do and say, that’s the same with what they want to provide communities,” Dunbar said. 

As for the $100,000 commitment from Exxon, no one’s sure exactly who will receive that money or how allocations will be made. The mayor, discussing that point, showed some frustration. He said he has tried, and will continue to try, to get the companies to put their promises of jobs and support for local infrastructure in writing.

The balance of goodwill that he is trying to maintain between everyone involved is delicate: the lithium companies, whose jobs and support his community desperately needs; the county officials he must work with; the residents of Lewisville; and the mayors he collaborates with on grant applications. These towns are small, and word spreads quickly; relationships are as precious as the riches deep below the ground.

As Dunbar-Jones, the city council member, finished her turkey sandwich in the late afternoon light of the diner, she spoke of her faith in the ties between the people of Lewisville. “It’s hard to get a group of people to work together, period, especially when they don’t know each other,” she said. “But we all know each other.”

Despite her confidence, she knows she’s dealing with relationships in which companies take what they can and leave, where the question of what they owe the communities that enrich them is naive. Her father benefited from his job at Phillips 66, but it couldn’t last forever. When the oil was gone, those who profited from it were, too. From their perspective, she said, it’s a question of “How long am I going to support a community I’m no longer in? It would be unrealistic to think that there will be some long-term benefits from it.” The same is true of lithium, and the companies that will mine it. At some point, they will leave, and take their jobs and their money with them. Dunbar-Jones only hopes they leave Lewisville a little better off once they’ve left.

Editor’s note: Climeworks is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This article originally appeared in Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

With lithium, Arkansas risks repeating oil boom and bust is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

The rig operator was stumped. He’d been making good progress, but now something blocked the way forward. The operator, Denny Mong, stared at an unassuming metal tube in the ground — the fossil of an oil well. Spread around it was an array of industrial detritus and steel tools like giant surgical implements, which sunk into the spongy Western Pennsylvania meadow.

Above the hole, Mong’s rig, which towered 50 feet into the air, suspended a vertical ramrod. When it dropped, the ramrod only shot 17 feet into the ground before slamming to a stop. Earlier, Mong had managed to reach more than 500 feet deeper into the well. Then this obstruction, whatever it was, sent him back to the start.

Clearing it — prime suspects included metal casing, rocks, or a tree branch — would allow him to send cement and pea gravel into the hole, which reached hundreds of feet into Appalachian rock formations. Once an active oil well, now it was an environmental nuisance and the target of an ambitious federal cleanup program.

The well needed to be decommissioned, along with at least 21 more spread across woodlands and fields in McKean County, Pennsylvania. The job fell to Mong and other employees of an oil service outfit called Plants & Goodwin, which specializes in plugging so-called orphan wells. Oil and gas companies are supposed to plug and clean up wells that they’ve drilled, but if they go bankrupt or otherwise disappear, that responsibility falls to the state, which then contracts with companies like Plants & Goodwin. If left festering, these wells can leak contaminants into surrounding groundwater or release methane, a greenhouse gas at least 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

Uncorking a well in this part of Appalachia reveals a blend of oil and gas that has a nauseous maté color and gurgles like witch’s brew. After generations of drilling, the remnants of both vernacular backyard digs and professional oil operations pockmark the land. Since drillers operated for more than a century with little regulatory oversight, documentation of well locations is scarce and cleanup quality is inconsistent. 

“Until the 1970s there were no strong plugging standards in place,” said Luke Plants, who heads Plants & Goodwin. “People just shoving tree stumps down a well to plug it, or a cast iron ball or something like that.”

The exact number of orphan wells nationwide is unknown. In late 2021, The Interstate Oil and Gas Commission, a multi-state organization, had more than 130,000 orphan wells on record but estimated that anywhere between 310,000 and 800,000 remained unidentified. That year the federal government took notice, folding $4.7 billion into the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to help states handle their orphan well inventories. The first batch of that money has trickled down to states and has been distributed to contractors like Plants & Goodwin. It’s easily the most funding ever spent to address the problem, but both states and pluggers are now facing hurdles as they begin to identify and plug wells. 

The state oil and gas regulators responsible for issuing well-plugging contracts are typically understaffed. As a result, the pace of contract assignment in some states has been inconsistent, making it difficult for plugging companies to staff up and plan ahead. Well pluggers are also few and far between. Since oil operators tend to avoid the costly work of well capping, the service has remained a niche industry. Plugging companies have also struggled to find trained workers, not to mention the specialized equipment required to plug wells. Along the way, some states have handed out millions of dollars in contracts to a subsidiary of an oil company with hundreds of compliance violations.

All the while, the oil and gas industry continues to spawn new orphan wells — magnitudes more than the number being plugged. Between 2015 and 2022, more than 600 oil and gas companies filed for bankruptcy, leaving thousands of wells unplugged. Market downturns affecting oil prices during the mid-2010s pushed many operations to insolvency. And even in times of industry booms, wells near the end of their production lifespans often end up in the hands of small oil patch operators with tight margins. Further, state laws requiring companies to post collateral for their wells in case of bankruptcy are meager. This combination of weak rules and bankruptcies has caused orphan well inventories to balloon. For example, Pennsylvania’s list of 20,000 orphan wells grows by about 400 each year; the state has plugged just 73 wells with the federal money that began to arrive last year.

In the muddy pasture in northwest Pennsylvania, Mong was trying to unclog his way to the well’s bottom. Using a rig attachment called a cherry picker — imagine a four-foot steel clothespin — he worked to spear unknown detritus from the depths. Next to the hole lay 30-foot-long clay-frosted tubes of steel casing already hauled out. After reducing the borehole to a hollow dirt cavern, the pluggers will pour cement until it nearly fills to the surface and top the rest of the way with gravel, insulated by steel casing to protect groundwater. They will then decapitate the casing to a few feet below ground and cover it with dirt. 

For the pluggers, the work is a bespoke combination: a little science and a lot of art. Sharp intuition, engineering know-how, grit, and luck imbue each effort. One capping can take anywhere from three days to three months, sometimes costing more than $100,000.

A lot needs to happen to orphan wells before they’re plugged — at least on paper. The state has to identify them, the threat they pose, the costs to plug them, and search for any elusive owner to pin the costs on. And while that’s a process states have handled for many years, most state plugging programs have relatively small budgets and staff compared to the well inventories. Now, federal funding is compelling those programs to exponentially increase the number of well-capping contracts, an impossible task without bigger staffs and nimbler processes. 

In a normal year, the California Geologic Energy Management Division (CalGEM), which regulates oil and gas production in the state, might contract plugging for 30 wells. According to former CalGEM employees, decommissioning even that number of wells had the agency running on all cylinders. 

“Available staffing for oversight was definitely a major limiting factor,” said Dan Dudak, who was the Southern District Deputy of CalGEM from 2011 to 2020, and now acts as a consultant on well-plugging projects. In just the last five years, the department “lost a lot of their institutional knowledge” in three different leadership changes, he said. Nonetheless, CalGEM revealed an $80 million project last July to cap 378 wells with funding from state and federal money along with industry fees.

Other states also have catching up to do. One 2022 Ohio state audit observed that its Department of Natural Resources struggles to meet orphan well program spending targets, in part due to staffing shortages. “[T]he Division can only increase efforts dedicated to well plugging preparation work as fast as it can recruit, train, and hire permanent employees,” the audit claimed, recommending that the agency double its staff to post plugging contracts in a more timely fashion and consider outsourcing the task of drafting contracts.  

Pennsylvania has 70 well inspectors and a tally of around 20,000 orphan wells. According to Neil Shader, spokesperson for the state Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP, the agency is considering hiring more inspectors to increase its oversight. Earlier this year, the state legislature approved a $5.75 million budget increase for DEP, some of which may boost its well plugging contract capacity.

Still, the pace of contract creation in Pennsylvania has put pluggers in a precarious place. Plants said that when Pennsylvania received $25 million in its first batch of federal funding, he staffed up. A torrent of contracts were awarded but then stopped — leading from feast to famine. A six-month gap meant furloughs and mothballing equipment. “It costs contractors a tremendous amount of money to do all that,” he said. “You end up creating an incentive to not scale at all, just stay small.”

To expedite aspects of the contract-drafting process, DEP has signaled that it may outsource some of that work. Meanwhile, Ohio is putting some of its federal money into an expedited process called the Landowner Passover Program, where approved landowners who find orphan wells on their land may act as a surrogate for the state, awarding a contract to a plugger that Ohio will pay for. 

Ohio has 44 contractors on its rolls and utilizes a pre-approval process for its pluggers to maintain quality control. Pennsylvania’s DEP is considering adopting its own vetting process, according to Shader, the agency spokesperson. Without it, there is no central parapet to separate under-qualified contractors from federally funded plugging. “There are not enough defined rules in place,” said Plants. “And even the rules that are there don’t get followed so well all the time.” 

Not much stands in the way of a corner-cutting contractor. In remote pockets of Appalachia, improperly dumping chemical fluids from a site or shoddy plug job could go unnoticed. “I think it’s even less likely to get checked now,” Plants said. “Because nobody wants to limit the pool of potential well pluggers. We need to get more pluggers involved — whether that plugging is being done correctly or not.”

Last year, Pennsylvania Deputy Secretary Kurt Klapkowski of the DEP’s Office of Oil and Gas Management addressed that anxiety by announcing that parties with significant outstanding violations, such as contractors with a poor service record or operators with environmental infractions, wouldn’t receive state contracts. “I feel pretty confident that we would not be issuing contracts to operators that had significant outstanding violations — either on the contracting side of things or on the environmental protection side,” he said.

For a plugger, non-compliance could mean illegal dumping or improperly sealing a well; for an operator, it might mean abandoning a well without plugging it. But such policies can be difficult to implement when oil and gas companies sometimes operate through a bevy of subsidiaries in multiple states. 

In December of last year, the Pennsylvania DEP awarded Next LVL Energy contracts to plug 30 wells in the state. The company is a subsidiary of Diversified Energy, an energy giant that has amassed a massive number of wells at the end of their lives, stoking fears that the company is likely to orphan them. According to one class action lawsuit against Diversified in West Virginia, around 10 percent of its 23,309 wells in the state are technically abandoned but unplugged. Just this year Pennsylvania inspectors slapped the operator with around 300 new or unresolved operational violations. (The state DEP didn’t respond to a request for comment on Next LVL’s contracts.)

Ohio has also given half of its first installment of federal money, $12.5 million, to Next LVL Energy to oversee the plugging of as many as 320 wells. To the southeast, West Virginia has given the company a similar sum to plug 100 wells. Spokespeople for both state environmental agencies defended their decisions, noting that they followed state and federal guidelines while selecting pluggers. “We will keep a close eye on implementation,” said Andy Chow, a spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. “Should any violations in this contract be discovered or otherwise come to our attention we will review those actions.”

In West Virginia, Next LVL isn’t plugging any wells associated with Diversified, according to Terry Fletcher, chief communications officer with the state’s Department of Environmental Protection. “At the time the contracts were awarded, Next LVL had no outstanding environmental violations in the state,” he added.

Finding qualified workers for the oil field is no easy feat, either. The last decade has seen drops in oil prices that rendered many fossil fuel companies insolvent, along with a shift to shale exploration, which requires fewer workers. As a result, job openings have dwindled and many qualified workers have left Appalachia.

Plugging wells also requires skilled labor. Thus, the limited number of qualified workers is in high demand. That’s good for wages, but without a large workforce to fill positions as states push out contracts with increasing frequency, another problem arises: “You just get this arms race for the same small pool of workers,” said Plants. “That’s not actually helpful for scaling or expanding the supply side of this business.” 

Plants has brought in experienced pluggers from Texas oil fields to help train up a new generation of skilled Pennsylvania hands. “We want to develop a local workforce that understands this work,” he said. But “you can’t just put whole crews of inexperienced people out there.”

There’s a lot of on-the-job training, but that extra work advances his vision. Some of his most recent hires came from area high schools and technical schools, where he has made a pitch: “We want to give you a long-term career.” 

Bronson Knapp, who owns Hagen Well Services in Ohio, has faced similar challenges. “The good old farm boy is hard to find,” he said. A worker shortage is one of the reasons Ohio is behind on well pluggings. The state has awarded new contracts even as work from previous contracts hasn’t been completed. “We awarded 380 wells this year, but our contractors are still 400 wells behind us,” said Jason Simmerman, the orphan well program engineer with the state’s Department of Natural Resources.

Rigs used to plug wells can be hard to come by, too. Drilling technology may advance, but orphan well-plugging is frozen in time. The tech required is often vintage, which means pluggers are on the prowl for a shrinking number of rigs that may be older than the wells they plug. It’s not unusual for a plugger in New York to look as far as Texas for a used rig. Mong’s rig was from the 1950s. Another rig at a nearby work site was manufactured in 1981 and welded to the bed of a Vietnam War-era military truck.

On the whole, a few recent high school graduates on Plants’ payroll might not seem like bellwethers of a next-generation workforce. But some experts watching the federal orphan well program contend that a well-plugging wave could revive regions whose economic fates are tied to dwindling resource extraction sectors. “The most positive thing that could happen is that we begin to get more companies plugging wells, especially in rural, distressed areas to help their local economies,” said Ted Boettner, a senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute, a think tank focused on economic and environmental sustainability in Appalachia.

“Oil and gas industries have lost thousands of jobs over the last decade,” he told Grist. “This is helping people who lose their jobs” and providing “a way for people to transition into cleaning up this mess of the last 150 years.”

The federal program includes requirements and guidance to help ensure that the work on the ground benefits workers. In order to qualify for funding, states must ensure that plugging contracts meet standards outlined by the Davis-Bacon Act, a federal law that guarantees government-funded labor matches average pay rates for similar work in a region, known as the prevailing wage.

Failure to follow the federal government’s requirement risks its scrutiny. For example, last year the GOP-led Pennsylvania legislature passed a law dictating how much a contractor might receive to plug a well as part of Pennsylvania’s orphan well program. The amounts allocated were a fraction of typical costs, likely leaving contractors unable to pay their workers the prevailing wage. With federal money tied up in the program, the Department of Interior filed a brisk response warning that the law could threaten Pennsylvania’s ability to comply with program standards and that the state could be cut off from federal funding.

In Ohio, Davis-Bacon requirements appear to have an effect on well-capping work not funded by the federal program. Though the Buckeye State doesn’t have any wage requirement for general well-plugging work, cappers who have taken contracts appear to be paying higher wages — whether or not the job is federally funded. “Because nobody wants to make one wage one day and another the next day, our contractors that are working on our federal program are taking that perspective and paying those wages across the board now,” said Simmerman, Ohio’s orphan well program engineer.

Out west, California is working to nurture a workforce at a much larger scale. Last year, the state legislature passed a law directing the California Workforce Development Board, or CWDB, to launch apprenticeship programs to train new classes of well pluggers. It could become a model for skilled labor creation. Its first pilot program is using the expertise of a Kern County well-capping company, California Legacy Well Services, which is creating a plugging curriculum to fold into existing training provided by Local 12, the International Union of Operating Engineers. As a result, union-affiliated labor will represent part of the well-plugging workforce. 

The thinking is two-pronged: access to quality jobs and layoff mitigation. That means offering good work to skilled laborers vulnerable to the energy transition. “So rather than just worry about the loss of jobs, it’s an opportunity to think about the new jobs for trades workers,” said Tim Rainey, executive director of CWDB. The program is in the early stages, but it offers a glimmer of what an effective orphan well program could yield.

Organized labor in California’s oil fields is of two types: industrial unions and trades unions. Members of industrial unions cultivate skills on a worksite, while trades unions learn the ropes through training apprenticeships like the ones CWDB is developing. 

A quirk in California law may lock out the industrial unions. The law requires “a skilled and trained workforce” for capping jobs, an innocuous-sounding phrase that refers to highly technical requirements in the state labor code that disqualify oil workers from industrial unions such as the United Steelworkers, or USW.

Norman Rogers, a spokesperson and member of USW Local 675 in Southern California, called the legislative sleight of hand “a control job.” Trades unions “have a larger workforce and are able to influence the political landscape,” he said. “They can have all sorts of people go to lobby.”

By expanding the language to characterize eligible workers as “skilled and trained or covered by a labor management agreement,” the law could tap into tens of thousands of union workers represented by USW, Rogers said.

The question of who dominates the green jobs of tomorrow remains an open one. Despite the many bottlenecks, the orphan well program could be an attractive coda to the fossil fuel era if it benefits workers. 

“We drilled the first oil well in America,” said James Kunz, an administrator at the Pennsylvania Foundation for Fair Contracting, who has worked to ensure favorable wages in state capping contracts. “We have the scars of that and a real opportunity.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/abandoned-oil-well-job-solution-pennsylvania/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org