Oil and Gas Cleanups Are on Biden's Agenda. Will Texas Embrace It?
The Texas Tribune quotes Daniel Raimi in a piece about Biden's federal directive to speed up well reclamation efforts.
"'We don’t know how likely (orphaned wells) are to cause groundwater pollution or how much methane they emit,' said Daniel Raimi, a senior research associate at Resources for the Future, a nonprofit that researches environmental, energy and natural resource issues. 'The reason they’re problematic is because we don’t know how to prioritize them. It’s a big void.'
An analysis by Raimi and other researchers for Columbia’s University's Center on Global Energy Policy found that a federal program to plug orphan wells could create as many as 120,000 jobs if half a million wells were plugged. But the effort would require significant coordination with states to identify and prioritize those wells."
