Last year, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a law freezing bond amounts for conventional wells.
“We got played,” said Ray Kemble, the most outspoken of a small group of Dimock residents who have battled the drilling company and state regulators alike.
Pa. estimates there are more than 200,000 abandoned wells. Hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal infrastructure bill could help the state put a dent in plugging them.
Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. was charged in 2020 with violating state environmental laws after a grand jury investigation found the Houston-based driller failed to fix faulty gas wells that had been leaking methane into aquifers in Dimock and surrounding communities for more than a decade.
Pennsylvania gas wells produced about 7.1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in 2020 — the largest volume of natural gas ever produced in the state in a single year.
The state stopped the practice in 2018, but a measure in the state legislature this year would bring it back for conventional drillers.
Pennsylvania’s highest court has delivered a victory for natural gas exploration firms, ruling that the state attorney general’s office doesn’t have authority under state law to sue them on anti-trust grounds over their mineral rights-leasing practices.
