Is There a Orphan Well on Your Land? Tell Us About It! - WV Surface Owners' Rights Organization

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West Virginia Surface Owners’ Rights Organization
Is There a Orphan Well on Your Land? Tell Us About It!
Oct 9, 2018	View this Alert Online

WV-SORO is involved in several approaches to getting the industry to plug the 12,000 wells on surface owners’ land that have stopped producing. (The W.Va. Code calls these “abandoned” wells.)

WV-SORO is particularly concerned with the 4000 of those wells have gone unplugged so long that the driller/operator responsible for plugging the has gone out of business — resulting in what we call “orphaned” wells.

We would like some examples of those wells on your land to use in our approaches. Do you have one on you?

Particularly if you have an “orphaned” well on your land that has been out of production for many years, we would like to hear from you. But even if it is just an “abandoned” well that has not produced but still has a responsible operator, we’d like to hear from you. (If it is providing free gas to you or someone we aren’t interested in it and we don’t want anyone to lose their free gas if the well isn’t causing any problems.)

Please email us with the API number of the well and a phone number and other contact information for yourself. Here is a new page on our web site about how to find the API number. https://wvsoro.org/what-are-oil-and-gas-wells-api-numbers-how-to-find-them-and-use-them-to-get-info-on-wells/

Here is a page on some of the Legislative priorities we will have for the 2019 Legislative session that include some dealing with plugging orphaned wells. https://wvsoro.org/wv-soro-2018-legislative-priorities/

Here is part of an interview by West Virginia Pubic Radio with WVSORO co-founder Dave McMahon on the subject https://wvsoro.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/wvpr-interview-orphan-wells.mp3 and a link to Public Radio piece that resulted http://www.wvpublic.org/post/how-orphan-natural-gas-wells-can-affect-consumers#stream/0 .