Source: Capital + Main

Excerpt:

For the first time in more than 60 years, the Bureau of Land Management will force oil and gas companies to set aside more money to guarantee they plug old wells, preventing them from leaking oil, brine and toxic or climate-warming gasses.

The rule, finalized this month, comes at a critical time. Money previously set aside to clean up wells on federal land would have covered the cost of fewer than 1 out of 100, according to the government’s own estimates, and the vast majority of the country’s wells sit inactive or barely producing, meaning they’ll soon need to be plugged.

But the federal agency’s work falls short of protecting taxpayers from the oil industry’s cleanup costs, according to a ProPublica and Capital & Main review of contracts or other cost estimates at tens of thousands of wells across the country. While the updated rule will shrink the gap between companies’ financial guarantees to plug wells, known as bonds, and the cost of the work, it still leaves a significant shortfall.

Read more: Oil companies are not setting aside enough money to plug abandoned wells