Another Source of Greenhouse Gas: Abandoned Oil Wells (sacbee.com) 123
The Sacramento Bee published a video showing dozens of oil tankers anchored off California's coast as the current demand for oil plummets. But looking toward the future, they've also published along with it a special warning from the director of the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity's Climate Law Institute:
California Resources Corporation, the state's largest oil and gas producer, is the latest oil producer to seek bankruptcy, aiming to wipe out more than $5 billion in debt and equity interests... This bankrupt company also faces more than $1 billion in costs to properly plug and abandon its 18,700 wells in the state. That problem goes far beyond CRC. A state-commissioned report found that cleaning up California's 107,000 oil and gas wells could cost a staggering $9.2 billion.
Saddling taxpayers with cleanup costs after pocketing the profits would be outrageous, yet many oil producers have done just that, walking away from millions of wells across the U.S. With more bankruptcies coming, the risk that oil companies weasel out of well cleanup keeps increasing... The risks aren't just financial. When wells sit idle, they corrode and leak. Experts point to nearly 75,000 wells in California that are "idle" or near-idle, producing little to no oil, or "orphaned," having no viable or responsible operator... [M]ethane frequently leaked by idle wells is a greenhouse gas that warms the planet 87 times more than the same amount of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Potentially tens of thousands of idle wells are leaking methane into the air, worsening climate change and increasing the risk and magnitude of heat waves and fires like those we're suffering now.
Yet Governor Newsom's administration keeps rewarding this polluting industry, including CRC. This year, state oil regulators have issued more than 1,600 permits for new wells. More than 300 went to CRC. This will only increase cleanup costs once wells stop producing or their owners go bust. Even if the state stopped issuing permits today, plugging and cleaning up existing wells at the current snail's pace will take decades. California can't just keep approving drilling, waiting for this tottering industry to collapse. We need a plan for a managed, just transition.
One solution gives Gov. Newsom a chance to tackle multiple problems at once: accelerating well remediation. By using the state's authority to speed well cleanup we can reduce the environmental and fiscal risk from these wells and create good jobs.
Saddling taxpayers with cleanup costs after pocketing the profits would be outrageous, yet many oil producers have done just that, walking away from millions of wells across the U.S. With more bankruptcies coming, the risk that oil companies weasel out of well cleanup keeps increasing... The risks aren't just financial. When wells sit idle, they corrode and leak. Experts point to nearly 75,000 wells in California that are "idle" or near-idle, producing little to no oil, or "orphaned," having no viable or responsible operator... [M]ethane frequently leaked by idle wells is a greenhouse gas that warms the planet 87 times more than the same amount of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Potentially tens of thousands of idle wells are leaking methane into the air, worsening climate change and increasing the risk and magnitude of heat waves and fires like those we're suffering now.
Yet Governor Newsom's administration keeps rewarding this polluting industry, including CRC. This year, state oil regulators have issued more than 1,600 permits for new wells. More than 300 went to CRC. This will only increase cleanup costs once wells stop producing or their owners go bust. Even if the state stopped issuing permits today, plugging and cleaning up existing wells at the current snail's pace will take decades. California can't just keep approving drilling, waiting for this tottering industry to collapse. We need a plan for a managed, just transition.
One solution gives Gov. Newsom a chance to tackle multiple problems at once: accelerating well remediation. By using the state's authority to speed well cleanup we can reduce the environmental and fiscal risk from these wells and create good jobs.
how are you gonna pay for that ??? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, is the Free Market gonna fix this?
How about the owners?
It's gonna be the taxpayers. And every living thing on the planet.
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Some "genius" in the government will offer grants to private companies to redevelop abandoned oil wells. They'll work on it for a short time and once the grant money has been siphoned up they'll walk away from it. By time the business, lobbyist, and politicians work out the funding arrangements there won't be any teeth left to stop them. Worst of both worlds, the environment is fucked AND the taxpayer paid for it.
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Time for a rethink:
http://www.outpost-of-freedom.... [outpost-of-freedom.com]
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This is why carbon pricing is good. You can make capping abandoned wells economically attractive by making it save companies money on their carbon bill, and if they don't want to do the work you just spend the revenue on doing it yourself.
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Or perhaps even simpler: limit the number of wells. You can't make a new well unless an existing one is closed and capped off. That way, even if you can't find the owner of a well, *someone* will eventually cap it off to make way for their own project.
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Which is why you don't want people who think businesses shit ice cream running the government. That's a recipe for the worst of both sectors: government bureaucracy with private sector lack of accountability.
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California has gone wild forcing in-state electricity producers and electricity producers in neighboring states to shut down fossil fuel fired plants. No electricity from fossil fuels, means no fossil fuels pumped from the earth, means pumps cannot be run profitably and the companies running those pumps can't stay in business.
Yet I'm not surprised that another ignoramus is demanding that free enterprise repair a government-caused disaster.
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That isn't the only reason why producers are going bust in the U.S. Oil prices are in the toilet. If you can't profitably pump and sell when oil is $40/barrel or lower, you're sunk.
Re:how are you gonna pay for that ??? (Score:4, Insightful)
When I was in school 30 years ago, we learned: a natural deposit is a place with a) an increased concentration of the desired mineral which b) can be exploited under current economic conditions. Apparently, in the fracking boom, many people ignored b).
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The unfortunate truth is that some folks are still trying to sell drilling rights in ANWR. I don't know that the price to produce there is any better, but with the overall market being down and supplies being up, it seems foolish to push that through, just from an economic perspective.
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They didn't ignore b). They just assumed the the then-current economic conditions would be stable for a much longer period than they actually were.
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Yet I'm not surprised that another ignoramus....
Looked in a mirror lately?
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Yet I'm not surprised that another ignoramus is demanding that free enterprise repair a government-caused disaster.
It's unregulated "free enterprise" (as if such a thing has ever existed)
that caused this problem in the first place.
Of course, it is right-wing idiots like Mr. MapleSyrup
that are unable to understand this.
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What does this have to do with free markets? Nothing. Free market doesn't mean free for all. You can still make companies pay for causing environmental damage. This sort of thing can happen with socialism too .. in fact it's more likely with socialism .. who is going to hold the government accountable when they will just block or suppress the media.
This is not a failure of free market, it's a failure of regulatory authorities. If anything it shows how F'd up government is. You don't think socialist governme
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This is not a failure of free market, it's a failure of regulatory authorities.
But all environmental regulations do is destroy the free market. Fox News told me so, and they would never lie to me.
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What are you talking about? Most regulated in the US, perhaps, though that's a very low bar. In the world? Please learn about the world before you say crazy shit like that.
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It is "one of" the most heavily regulated areas in the world. The US has heavy regulations on the oil industry and is leading the world and one of the only nations in the world that has reduced its emissions in the last decade.
Weird. I just looked at https://ourworldindata.org/co2... [ourworldindata.org] and it shows that while the US has cut emissions, it has done so less (by percentage) than many other "western" nations. It took me about 4 minutes with Google to prove you wrong. A waste of my time, but it's telling that that was the most plausible falsehood you could come up with. Or did you actually believe it was true? Liar or idiot, which is worse?
Also, previous comments were talking about environmental regulations, not oil regulations. Si
The American way (Score:2)
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So, is the Free Market gonna fix this?
You can't fix problems the way they were caused.
It's gonna be the taxpayers.
A distinction without a difference. You and I will pay for this regardless of how this problem will get solved. A few possible cases:
1) We'll pay for it through taxes as the government comes and cleans up.
2) We'll pay for it directly as the costs of the free market solution get passed along to us.
3) We'll pay for it in health / the planet if it doesn't get fixed at all.
Companies don't voluntarily give up profit. Don't be confused that the poor poor tax payer i
Re:how are you gonna pay for that ??? (Score:5, Insightful)
1) and 2) have a fundamental difference: Who the 'we' is. In case 1), the 'we' consists of the tax-paying population of the country, collectively. But in case 2), the 'we' consists only of those people who purchase refined oil products.
Thus 1) is going to meet with more objection, as it violates people's moral sensiilities to be required to pay (indirectly) for something that is of no benefit to themselves.
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For most products you'd be correct. However in this case the reality is 100% of people (yes hippies too) consume refined oil products. Even the homeless guy in the street carries his worldly possessions around in a bag made of refined petroleum products.
I type this to you on a keyboard with keys made from refined petroleum products, wearing a shirt made from refined petroleum products after which I'm going to go downstairs and go shopping (on my bike, pfft I don't use gasoline) and I will get there literall
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So, is the Free Market gonna fix this?
You can't fix problems the way they were caused.
It's gonna be the taxpayers.
A distinction without a difference. You and I will pay for this regardless of how this problem will get solved. A few possible cases: 1) We'll pay for it through taxes as the government comes and cleans up. 2) We'll pay for it directly as the costs of the free market solution get passed along to us. 3) We'll pay for it in health / the planet if it doesn't get fixed at all.
Companies don't voluntarily give up profit. Don't be confused that the poor poor tax payer is screwed with this outcome. *We* are the ones ultimately responsible. We don't pay for externalities. We don't reduce the damaging resources we consume. And ultimately we have no mechanism to hold someone else to account other than some kind of government action that raises the cost to us.
It's gonna be the taxpayers.
A distinction without a difference. You and I will pay for this regardless of how this problem will get solved. A few possible cases: 1) We'll pay for it through taxes as the government comes and cleans up. 2) We'll pay for it directly as the costs of the free market solution get passed along to us. 3) We'll pay for it in health / the planet if it doesn't get fixed at all.
It's amazing how many conservatives don't understand the market.
Price is only loosely based on cost. The much bigger factor is what the market will bear. If a company thinks they can charge twice as much and people will still buy it, that's what they'll charge. And on the other side, if they can reduce the cost of production they won't voluntarily lower their prices. (In general, unless it's a marketing ploy to take share from competitors.)
Companies don't voluntarily give up profit.
Oh, so you do understand that. But you're ignoring the implication.
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Oh no I know that in great detail. But we're not talking about some abstract concept here. We are talking about a very specific market here, one that is represented by the single most fungible and highly traded commodity in the world. Those billions the oil companies make? They aren't surplus profits, instead they are a representation of the absolutely insane volumes of the good which is consumed globally.
You can see the result of this in action on a daily basis where the price of the product directly fluxu
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By the way, don't label people. Anyone who has seen my posting history would likely consider you stupid for even remotely considering me to be conservative.
I'll take your word for it. I'm not going to review post history on everything I reply to. I'm mostly focused on this idea:
And ultimately we have no mechanism to hold someone else to account other than some kind of government action that raises the cost to us.
This is the line always given by conservative think tanks for why we shouldn't impose any costs on corporations, from regulations to taxes. "The people end up paying it anyway, so why make the corps deal with all the paperwork? If you want more tax income then just raise taxes on individuals."
And the reason, like I said, is two-fold. 1) It makes the right set of people pay for the true
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You may know a more logical explanation, but Occam suggests it's based on competition. Each station is setting their prices as high as they think they can, constrained by the other stations within sight.
There's no Occam's Razor to be applied here. Only independent stations set their price locally. All others owned by an oil company or refining coming have central managed pricing that typically looks across the state level, or quite often even multiple states at once (in the USA), for most other countries it's on a country level. The local price matching is based on competition. The difference between locations is dependent on demographics and services (e.g. highway stations command a premium as do inner ci
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You may know a more logical explanation, but Occam suggests it's based on competition. Each station is setting their prices as high as they think they can, constrained by the other stations within sight.
There's no Occam's Razor to be applied here. Only independent stations set their price locally. All others owned by an oil company or refining coming have central managed pricing that typically looks across the state level, or quite often even multiple states at once (in the USA), for most other countries it's on a country level.
Oil companies own less than 5% of the gas stations in the US. [api.org] About 36% are owned by retail chains, and 60% are owned by individuals/families.
When drew_kime observes:
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I'm not sure what the fuck you think you're describing.
The actual industry itself. If I took too long to reply it's because I asked a USA colleague how it's done, the answer I got is that in the USA the costs get baked into the terminal gate price.
So apparently the same thing applies in the USA just at one level higher.
Mind you notice how the GP described exactly the same scenario I did? It generally points to the competition dynamics being the same. To which end, and god I feel like a broken record: The costs get passed on to the consumer.
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I'm not sure what the fuck you think you're describing.
The actual industry itself.
LOL, there's so much wrong with your description of the US industry, I hardly know where to begin. A few obvious things are:
1) Your implication that the oil majors own a significant portion of US gas stations is completely, utterly wrong.
2) Your claim that "100% of companies in the industry have dedicated departments to realtime price adjusting what consumers pay for the product" is completely wrong.
3) Your claim that "the [price] difference between locations is dependent on demographics and services (
Re: how are you gonna pay for that ??? (Score:5, Insightful)
For past wells, we are probably screwed. But in the future, the Government should require a security deposit equal in value to the final well cleanup to be held in escrow for every new permit. Over time it should be required to be kept current with the current estimate of cleanup. If oil companies want to lower their escrow, they can fund improved cleanup technology development. If they abandon a well, the money is forfeit and the Government uses it to clean up the well. If they responsibly close the well, they can borrow against the escrow to perform the work, then have it returned upon completion.
Landlords do something like this all the time.
Re: how are you gonna pay for that ??? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure how it works elsewhere, but in Texas, the oil & gas industry-funded Railroad Commission plugs orphan wells not capped off by bankrupt operators. It takes a while for an orphan well to qualify, 12 months IIRC, but there are other RRC programs that allow another contractor to take over (adopt) an abandoned well.
It's probably an order of magnitude worse in bankrupt oil-producing nations like Venezuela, a socialist paradise, but the capitalist US still has the resources and wherewithal to clean up these industrial messes.
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Why are you trolling that the government system is responsible for any difference?
A capitalist or socialist or even a communist government can enact laws to ensure wells get capped. Matters not a bit which style.
Some people just can't help getting their panties in a twist at every opportunity they can.
Gotta virtue signal any time they can.
Re: how are you gonna pay for that ??? (Score:4, Informative)
"require a security deposit equal in value to the final well cleanup to be held in escrow for every new permit." - That is exactly how it works at the moment.
The amount is about $10,000, which should be sufficient to plug a well, but ridiculous environmental regulations have exploded the cost of cleanup to a much larger number, so the money in escrow is not enough.
Re: how are you gonna pay for that ??? (Score:5, Interesting)
The amount is about $10,000, which should be sufficient to plug a well, but ridiculous environmental regulations have exploded the cost of cleanup to a much larger number, so the money in escrow is not enough.
Which of the regulations are ridiculous?
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If the price of actually capping the well is much more than the amount that is set aside for the capping then I would say it isn't the "ridiculous environmental regulations" that are a problem but the amount of money set aside that is a problem.
I could probably cap a well for less than $5 if I didn't have to worry about the "ridiculous environmental regulations". Just place a couple of layers of tin foil over the top of the well pipe, hold it in place with some wire and it is "capped". Would it meet regulat
Stupid regulations are preventing remediation (Score:3)
The problem is ridiculous environmental regulations. All that is necessary, is for someone to open a well, push down a plug and pour in a few tons of cement. Then, sell the remaining stuff on the surface as scrap metal.
Environmental regulations however, adds an enormous extra burden of tests and cleanup and surfacing of the surroundings, which are mostly unnecessary, since the long abandoned area is already overgrown with brush and the regulations require removal of the topsoil to decontaminate the area
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I'm sorry if "ridiculous environmental regulations" are in place makes it more costly. Can you please point out which ones are ridiculous? You've mentioned multiple times but never give any details.
Is it ridiculous to expect the land to be usable after the resources have been extracted? We know what happens when companies are given full range to do what they want.. bury poi
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I'm sorry if you see me as a problem. A few rich business owners come in and shit all over the environment, they get even more rich at the expense of future generations who have to clean up the mess.
There is a superfund location in my small down from a chroming facility back in the 70s and 80s. Instead of properly disposing of their byproduct they buried it. Now the groundwater has
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We are in this 'crisis' not because of regulation, regulations are known and a cost of business, but because oil companies and the like successfully lobbied against the Superfund system, where they paid for clean up of their own properties, and e
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The fix was to make them pony up the reclamation money before the drill went into the ground. They should have to place in escrow the reclamation money before they are allowed to start work. That way they can never just abandon a well. There is no fix for this now - the damage has already been done.
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The taxpayers and the businesses already paid for this. Ever increasing environmental fees are supposed to create funds for these types of issues. However, these funds are regularly raided to pay for big boondoggles such as rail projects and solar implementations and a ton of bureaucracy.
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Why in the hell are they allowed to self insure for cleanup.
Every time they go to close they claim bankruptcy then they don't have the "self insured" money to do the clean up.
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I called them earlier and apparently, they liked the idea and are looking to see if they can turn a cost center into a profit center.
Re: how are you gonna pay for that ??? (Score:1)
Can we just jump to the part where we all blame China
They have to give us a reason but your dumbass post should suffice.
Privatized profits and socialized losses (Score:5, Insightful)
That's how capitalism works in the USA.
Going forward, states should demand cleanup fees up front.
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..and sue those who haven't cleaned up. Somewhere down the chain someone's gotta have the money.
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Yep. The summary says " .... "orphaned," having no viable or responsible operator." but are the politicians really telling us that they have no clue who used to operate those wells?
They spent all the money on hookers and blow? Off to prison with them...
Re:Privatized profits and socialized losses (Score:5, Insightful)
The government knows. Problem is, the oil company owning the well is bankrupt or no longer doing business. Thus there is no legal entity the government can go after to pay for the cleanup costs.
It's the way business operates. Trump did just that - he starts a company, racks up tons of debt, then lets that company go bankrupt and Trump picks up the remains for a song. All the screwed over suppliers who are owed tons of money are collateral damage having done the work and supplied the materials for free.
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Trump did just that - he starts a company, racks up tons of debt, then lets that company go bankrupt and Trump picks up the remains for a song. All the screwed over suppliers who are owed tons of money are collateral damage having done the work and supplied the materials for free.
Yet, oddly, contractors still take his projects...
Perhaps the news stories written by journalists with a fourth grade understanding of the business world are exaggerating the issue?
You can't build a golf course, resort, or skyscraper without literally thousands of contractors, sub-contractors and sub-sub-contractors, all of whom the press report as "working for the a Trump organization" and when any of the contractors or subs fails at a task or is stiffed by another contractor, the press reports it as if Tr
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There's no shortage of naive contractors who he has not yet screwed over and who, like you, think the press reports are overblown.
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Yet, oddly, contractors still take his projects...
Which contractors? The same ones he'd hired previously, or new ones who didn't know his MO? I don't know much about his history with contractors, but this is basically the same reason why he's so beholden to Deutsche Bank - no one else will give him loans anymore.
As for your claim, "My unsupported notion of how the world should work totally beats rigorous journalism." No it doesn't.
Re: Privatized profits and socialized losses (Score:3, Insightful)
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If they are dipping into the funds for purposes other than what the trust was set up for that would be fraud.
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That's how capitalism works in the USA.
Going forward, states should demand cleanup fees up front.
The losses gets socialised regardless of which country, government, or economic system you follow. Fuel is one of the most generally consumed items on the planet. We'd either pay for it through taxes or through the cost of the end product. Profits don't get voluntarily dropped.
Time for a bond (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps it's time to start requiring companies operating or drilling oil wells to post a bond covering the cost of properly closing down a well up front, with interest from the posted bonds being committed to paying for remediation of older wells.
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There's some question of why that hasn't happened already.
There's Greed N. Corruption again. Drunk on the company dime, and shitting directly on everyone's shoes. And we're still standing here pretending like we have no idea where that obnoxious smell is coming from?
The only "question" left, is why we continue to ignore the elephant in the room.
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California already HAS such a program. (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps it's time to start requiring companies operating or drilling oil wells to post a bond covering the cost of properly closing down a well up front, ...
Or maybe charge fees that go into a fund to seal 'em up if the company doen't have a suitable process in place or goes belly-up, eh?
Surprise! California already has such a program [ca.gov].
Not only that, they jacked up the fees last year.
I wonder if that has anything to do with the oil companies with a lot of such wells, on which they're paying these higher fees, going belly up?
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California has a program to manage the capping of retired/abandoned wells? And the money is there BEFORE the well is retired/abandoned?
So WTF is the actual problem this article is about? Why didn't the authors include the existing solution in their article?
I wonder if that has anything to do with the oil companies with a lot of such wells, on which they're paying these higher fees, going belly up?
But they've already paid the fees on those wells before going belly-up, so what? Why isn't the revenue from the fees resolving the problem? The state has the money to do it, what's holding them back?
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Perhaps it's time to start requiring companies operating or drilling oil wells to post a bond covering the cost of properly closing down a well up front, with interest from the posted bonds being committed to paying for remediation of older wells.
So charge the end user then? It's not like companies are going to eat their profits. This is actually one of the areas where a socialised response may make more sense since there would be slightly more control over ensuring that the job gets done properly.
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Shareholders Liable (Score:2)
The shareholders who have profited handsomely from oil and gas should be liable for all costs.
The point of corps is Shareholders AREN't Liable (Score:2)
The shareholders who have profited handsomely from oil and gas should be liable for all costs.
What part of corporation and bankruptcy don't you understand?
The whole POINT of a corporation is that the investors' losses are limited to the amount they spent to buy the shares or bonds, rather than exposing them to unlimited additional costs if the corporation loses more than its assets.
Re:The point of corps is Shareholders AREN't Liabl (Score:5, Insightful)
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Reserve corporations for a few things with outsized benefits to society with iffy profit potential like maybe EV or space exploration.
Right, because there's a very slim chance EV will ever be profitable, especially after every alternative is essentially outlawed by some future "New Green Deal".
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Now there's a thought.
The current system is NOT SET IN STONE and was not dictated by the gods into stone tablets. We sometimes forget that. If the system isn't working, it should be changed. In fact, that's basically what a lot of movements are demanding.
Problem is: The economic and political systems have merged into some kind of abomination that has a strong lock-in effect. The main purpose of all that is to resist change. Because the system is working for the 0.1% at the top. It's only failing the rest of
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Maybe time to abolish corporations and make the owners personally liable for damages and debt.
Are you one of those people who have absolutely no savings in any kind of mutual fund, or 401k, etc? If you do have any, *you're* one of the owners.
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I once had some shares as a limited partner. Filing income tax in the 12 states where it did business was a massive pain in the ass. I can't imagine the insanity of being a limited partner in something converted from a multinational corporation.
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So here's the thing: how much would you put into your 401k if you knew that not only could you lose your money, someone could send you a bill for considerably more than you ever invested? And it's not just you- it's any investor. Limited liability is a cornerstone of investment. General partnerships without limited liability exist, but they are generally restricted to small businesses and each general partner has a meaningful say in what risks the enterprise undertakes.
You may not like the idea that someone
A simple solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Repeat for Fracking (Score:2)
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Everyone is greedy.
Yes, but there is "greedy" as in optimizing your profit within the acceptable parameters, and there's "greedy" as in bending the rules, breaking them where you can get away with it, re-writing them where you can buy a congress critter cheaply on sale, ignoring them or just plain old fucking them.
You can be selfish and social, or you can be a sociopath. Corporations have largely decided to be sociopaths. That doesn't mean they couldn't decide otherwise.
billions and decades (Score:1)
So it will take $9.2 billion and decades to clean up after oil companies but people still say that nuclear is not viable because of decommissioning costs?
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add some zeroes to the $ and decades. Now you know why nuclear is different.
$9.2 billion is the estimated cost. If you're not already adding some zeros and decades to that, your math is already wrong.
And give Greed N. Corruption another decade running as CEO of US Capitalism. We can turn an abandoned wind farm into a fucking toxic wasteland with enough ignorance. Baby powder is allegedly deadly now. We'll probably find out in 20 years that coffee pod plastic is the new asbestos, so I wouldn't worry too much about those differentiators.
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Wrong!
Decommissioning of nuclear power plants does not cost hundreds of billions and doesn't take thousands of years.
It takes millions to $1 billion per power plant and couple decades at most.
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Which is why suitable underground storage has to be found for it. After all it came out of the ground in the first place so putting it back iin should not be a problem so long as appropriate geological understanding has been developed.
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It's not the same as when it was removed from the earth, what makes you think you can just rebury it without consequences?
No. it is the same cause (Score:1)
Sigh. (Score:2)
"You get a permit for a new well if you close up two old ones"
Is it really that difficult a logistical exercise?
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"You get a permit for a new well if you close up two old ones"
What if I donate couple thousands $ to your re-election campaign? wink-wink
So... wait what? (Score:2, Insightful)
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If there are thousands of abandoned wells by now bankrupt companies... why do oil companies need to open up new wells? Just open up the old ones.
That was my thought: instead of approving new drilling permits, require the companies to take over existing orphaned wells first. Refurbishing those wells should be much cheaper than drilling and setting up a completely new well.
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Some of those wells were abandoned because the company went bust, some of them were abandoned because they were never going to be profitable. Requiring that the latter be reopened now isn't going to solve anything, and you don't know which are which because the corporations have gone boom and taken their records with them.
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Seriously?
People don't abandon productive, profitable oil wells, fields get depleted and drillers move on.
That's like asking "Why do people keep buying new cars, why not just fix up a used car?"
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Well, actually, now that I think about it there is a possible explanation - that these are permits for exploratory drilling that were applied for well before prices fell. Even if they are permits for full-scale wells, they may have been applied for many years ago. If that's the case, the drilling may never actually happen, or at least won't until prices come back up.
And god only knows what difficulties there may be
Hey ! Looking (Score:1)
old trick (Score:2)
Bancrupty, my ass. Aren't most of these companies founded specifically for oil drilling and funnel all profits up to a mother corporation? They aren't going bancrupt, it's just the cheapest way to close them when the wells are done. You could, of course, close shop properly, but that's costly. So you "go bancrupt" and let the taxpayer deal with the aftermath.
Of course, you could force these companies to put the expected costs (estimated by an independent party) of closing up business properly and handling t
The real problem is bankruptcy for corporations (Score:2)
Bankruptcy is a great protection for an individual who would become homeless without it, but a corporation? Applying standards that are good for a human to a corporation breeds corruption.
The entire executive staff, CEO, CFO, and the shareholders should be held proportionally accountable well ahead of taxpayers.
As a society, we need to continue to explore and define morality as a priority that overrides legality.
Check your premises (Score:2)
Demand for oil hasn't plummeted. There is simply more readily accessible supply both from a technology standpoint and a regulatory one. Nobody is going to waste money on a California well when they don't have to jump through insane regulatory hoops elsewhere.
As I've said myriad times before (Score:2)
Limiting pollution can't ever work. New opportunities, growing population, faster-cheaper-better; you're never going to be able to reduce any kind of resource usage, and hence you'll never be able to reduce any kind of waste production.
And nothing in nature has ever limited the fecal production of any animal, with the singular exception of population control. Unless you're happy with limiting human population through death -- either by artificial or natural means -- then we're guaranteed to produce more w
Maybe put out the forest fires? (Score:2)
Maybe next year start managing the forests with proper fire breaks and brush clearing. Maybe burn a few acres in the spring to prevent thousands of acres burning up in the fall.
Or blame global warming and pat yourself on the back for being a good environmentalist.
Re:Real unbiased source there (Score:4, Informative)
who pays to dispose of old windmills that have outlived their useful lives?
That depends on which state you live in, and in some states, which company is operating the turbines. Many states have started to require set-asides for decommissioning costs, but a lot of those requirements are relatively recent so there are old projects not covered. Also in some cases the site is re-powered with a newer turbine and in those cases decommissioning is part of the cost of the new project.
The system is rigged; duh. (Score:2)
The big players rig the system; the medium ones ride the waves if they can and the small ones get bought out or just try to survive.
Seriously, if you messed with big oil on this to properly handle it, you'd probably end up hanging yourself somehow or shooting yourself in the head twice... assuming they couldn't find something to ruin your life and take your power before that.
Re: (Score:1)
Do you seriously think old wind turbines are as environmentally destructive as abandoned wells? Fuck me, but the only thing more idiotic than the O&G's talking points are the fucking morons that repeat them.