This is Article 17 in an ongoing series examining America's abandoned and orphaned well problem.

The first sixteen articles in this series built a picture of how the abandoned well problem develops over time. Wells fail through predictable engineering mechanisms. Financial assurance doesn't keep pace with real plugging costs. Regulatory frameworks vary enough across states to produce very different outcomes from nearly identical problems. And when operators fail or walk away, the costs don't disappear. They shift to public programs, to landowners, and to federal taxpayers.

A new working paper from Resources for the Future (RFF) puts real numbers on some of those costs and asks a question the series hasn't directly answered yet. When public money is spent to plug orphaned wells, what does the program actually deliver, and is the spending justified by the results?

The paper, authored by Daniel Raimi and Christina Cilento (Working Paper 26-07, April 2026), examines data from roughly 2,158 well sites across six states, with $145 million in total decommissioning costs recorded. It's worth reading closely, not because the findings are simple, but because they connect directly to structural problems this series has been documenting since Article 4.

What plugging actually costs

The series first put a hard number on this in Article 5, which examined the bonding gap. The central figure there was $71,000 as a representative average plugging cost, against which a $10,000 federal bond provided roughly 14 cents of coverage per dollar of liability. The RFF paper, using actual cost records from six states and 2,158 wells, produces an average of roughly $67,000 per well site. The median is around $35,000. Both figures are consistent with the range Article 5 cited and confirm that the bonding gap isn't a modeling artifact. It's what the field data shows.

The variation around that average is worth understanding. Total costs ranged from $1,000 at the low end to $4.2 million for a single Texas well. Nine sites exceeded $1 million. The paper's regression analysis identifies the cost drivers in a way that tracks closely with what Article 4 described as the engineering reality of aging wells.

Depth adds roughly $4 to $5 per additional foot when controlling for other factors. That's not surprising. More footage to plug means more cement, more time, and more exposure to deteriorated casing and compromised barriers at depth. Well age adds about $285 per year. That figure captures the accumulated effect of the degradation mechanisms Article 4 covered in detail: cement shrinkage, casing corrosion, and pressure migration through micro-annular gaps. A well that sat for eighty years has had eight decades for that failure to compound.

Site reclamation, completing the surface work rather than only plugging the wellbore, adds roughly $32,000 per site. That cost is real and often overlooked in policy discussions that focus only on wellbore plugging. The tanks, piping, pad material, and disturbed soil don't clean themselves up. Across the 2,158 sites in the dataset, 90 percent involved both plugging and reclamation.

The most practically useful cost driver in the paper is the economies-of-scale finding. Each additional well per contract is associated with roughly $700 in lower per-well costs. Article 13 argued that batching is one of the clearest operational levers available to state programs, and the RFF data confirms it in a large sample. A state program that sends crews to five isolated wells one at a time is paying more per well than one running batched regional contracts, and the difference compounds across a large inventory.

Why state costs vary so much

Article 12 documented the regulatory patchwork in detail, showing that Pennsylvania and Texas sit at opposite ends of the spectrum on bonding, program maturity, and plugging rates. The RFF data reflects that directly.

Texas runs lower than every other state in the dataset. The authors attribute this partly to a well-developed contractor base, a large preexisting orphaned well program that generates more competition on bids, and possibly less stringent site remediation requirements. Article 12 made a similar observation: states with mature programs and high plugging volumes maintain a more functional contractor market, which keeps prices from spiking as badly when federal money arrives.

Michigan and West Virginia run the highest costs in the dataset, $130,000 and $90,000 per well on average respectively, and Pennsylvania averages $110,000. These are older basin states with shallow, very old wells. The depth isn't the driver there. The age is, along with the surface contamination histories and record gaps that Article 4 and Article 7 described. A Pennsylvania well drilled in 1920 with no cement bond log and a history of brine surface discharge costs more to decommission properly than a 1990s Texas well with documented construction records.

Article 13 noted that Pennsylvania's average plugging cost under state contracts jumped from roughly $50,000 to $106,000 when IIJA contracts came online, a supply-demand response to simultaneous ramping across states. The RFF paper captures a similar pattern in the temporal data, with 2023 and 2024 running relatively higher costs than adjacent years.

The methane question is harder to answer than the funding numbers suggest

Article 7 documented the gap between methane detection and methane characterization. Most reported measurements are point-in-time readings that confirm a pathway without quantifying a rate. Seasonal pressure variations, groundwater fluctuations, and equipment degradation all affect emission behavior, and a measurement taken on one day may not represent the long-term flux from a given well.

The RFF data is a real-world demonstration of exactly that gap. Methane scanning occurred at roughly 40 percent of the 2,158 sites. Of those scanned, methane was detected at 12 percent. Actual quantification, measuring an emission rate in grams per hour rather than just flagging presence, occurred at only 6 percent of the full dataset, covering 110 wells. North Dakota and Oklahoma reported no methane data at all, and Pennsylvania reported estimates that state regulators characterized as rough and not suitable for precise interpretation.

That leaves usable methane rate data for wells in West Virginia, Michigan, and Texas. The distribution among those 110 wells confirms what Article 15 described about the heavy-tailed structure of abandoned well emissions. The mean rate was 91.2 grams per hour, while the median was 2 grams per hour. Two wells accounted for roughly two-thirds of total methane in the sample. Four wells emitted more than 500 grams per hour, and two emitted more than 3,000 grams per hour.

That skew is the central finding on methane, and it has a direct implication for the cost-benefit arithmetic. Total plugging cost for the 110 quantified wells was about $5.9 million. Estimated methane abatement benefits, using EPA's social cost of methane and assuming an emissions decline rate of 6.4 percent annually, ranged from $1.4 million to $3.4 million depending on how long the wells would otherwise have continued emitting. Under most scenarios, decommissioning costs outweighed methane abatement benefits for 75 to 80 percent of those wells.

For the five highest emitters, benefits exceeded costs, sometimes well within a single year. For the median well, the social benefit of avoided methane was less than $800 over a 50-year horizon against a plugging cost of around $8,000.

Article 15 made the case that carbon credit revenue for well plugging is thin for average wells and that the real opportunity is concentrated in high emitters. The RFF data puts that argument on a quantitative footing. The median well doesn't support a carbon credit project, and it doesn't generate climate benefits that come close to justifying its plugging cost on methane grounds alone. The high emitters, the top 5 to 10 percent of the distribution, are where the methane case is real.

Property values are where the measurable benefit shows up

Article 8 examined how proximity to unplugged wells affects the people living near them. Landowners bear the first costs of discovery, carry the burden of notification, and in many cases absorb the initial impacts to water supply and surface conditions. The flip side of that proximity effect is that plugging and reclamation creates value for nearby properties.

The RFF paper attempts to quantify that effect across agricultural and residential parcels. Of the 2,158 wells, 296 were within 100 meters of a residential property. The authors estimate that restoring those sites increases residential property values by roughly $14 million. Another 1,491 wells were within 1,000 meters of agricultural parcels, with estimated value restoration of about $15 million. Combined, the property value benefit across the dataset is roughly $29 million.

The methodology involves simplifying assumptions that the authors document openly. They can't directly observe property values before and after plugging, so they use average per-acre values for surrounding parcels as a proxy for the value unlocked by restoring well-site land. Health and water risk reduction aren't separately quantified, though those effects are at least partially capitalized into property values already. The $29 million figure is best read as a lower bound on the true economic benefit, not a complete accounting.

Combining the methane abatement estimates and the property value figures, the paper places total quantified benefits in the range of $30 to $40 million against total costs of $145 million.

That gap doesn't mean the program failed. It means a program that plugged wells randomly, without targeting the highest environmental impacts, produced benefits lower than costs. The paper is explicit about this. Prioritizing high-emitting wells would change the result substantially.

Prioritization is the mechanism the data keeps pointing to

Article 6 examined risk-based triage in detail. The core finding there was that existing state prioritization frameworks are designed to address present exposure, typically immediate threats to groundwater and people, but don't systematically incorporate methane emission rates as a prioritization variable. That gap was described as a mismatch between what the tools do and what they're being asked to do.

The RFF paper arrives at the same place from a different direction. If the two highest emitters in the 110-well dataset account for roughly two-thirds of the sample's total methane, then plugging those two wells first produces a dramatically different cost-benefit ratio than plugging the median well first. The paper notes that for those high emitters, benefits exceeded costs in some cases within a single year, while for the median emitter even a 50-year horizon produces a climate benefit of less than $800.

That arithmetic makes the prioritization imperative hard to argue with. A dollar spent on a high-emitting well returns far more climate benefit than the same dollar spent on a low-emitting well. Most state prioritization systems don't know which wells are high emitters because most wells haven't been measured, and the measurement gap is getting worse.

The data regression is the part that matters most for the long run

Article 11 described the IIJA's $4.7 billion appropriation as bridge funding. The argument there was that a one-time allocation doesn't restructure the system. If the underlying problems of inadequate bonding, weak regulatory enforcement, and continued orphaning of new wells aren't addressed, the money just buys time.

The RFF paper adds a specific data dimension to that concern. The first tranche of IIJA grants encouraged but didn't require states to measure methane before and after plugging, and reporting was inconsistent. Only 6 percent of the 2,158 sites in the dataset have quantified methane rates, which is the authors' direct complaint. The knowledge base for improving future programs is thin because the measurement requirements weren't enforced.

Then in 2025, as Article 11 noted, the Orphaned Well Program Office reduced mandatory data collection requirements further. Pre- and post-plugging methane measurement were removed from required reporting, with the stated rationale being administrative speed. States could move faster without the measurement burden.

That tradeoff is real. Measurement slows operations and adds cost. But it also produces the data that would allow future programs to target high emitters, assess plugging effectiveness, and determine whether plugged wells stay sealed over time.

The authors flag the long-term plug integrity question directly. If plugged wells develop leaks five, twenty, or fifty years out, because the same cement degradation mechanisms that failed in the first plugging job continue operating, then the methane abatement benefits credited today may be partially reversed later. Knowing whether that's happening requires monitoring data that the revised federal requirements don't mandate. The program is spending less money on understanding what it's accomplishing at the same time it's reducing the requirements that would build that understanding.

What the full picture looks like

Sixteen articles in this series built the case that the abandoned well problem is structural, not incidental. Wells fail through known mechanisms. Bonding was designed to fail. Regulatory frameworks were designed to defer rather than eliminate liability. Corporate structures were used to move plugging obligations away from the value that created them.

The RFF paper adds a cost-benefit dimension to that picture. A $4.7 billion federal program, analyzed across 2,158 wells in six states, produced quantified benefits in the range of $30 to $40 million. That gap is real. It doesn't mean the program was wrong to fund. Property values increased, land was reclaimed, some wells that were leaking badly are now sealed, and jobs were created in communities that had lost oil and gas employment.

But the gap also means the program was less effective than it could have been, and the paper identifies the mechanism. Most wells don't emit enough methane to justify their plugging cost on climate grounds alone, and the programs that would identify the ones that do, through systematic pre-plug measurement and emissions-based prioritization, are being dismantled rather than built.

Article 6 argued that risk-based triage is the right tool within its design envelope, but it can't do what it wasn't designed for. Adding methane quantification to the triage criteria would bring it closer to a full-cost assessment. That won't happen without measurement data, and measurement data won't accumulate if it's not required.

The abandoned well problem is ultimately about what gets priced and what gets deferred. For most of the industry's history, plugging costs were deferred. Now that deferral is catching up as public spending. The RFF paper is an early empirical look at whether that public spending is being allocated to the places where it produces the most return. The answer, so far, is that it could be considerably better.

Sources and Further Reading

The sources below support the cost, benefit, and program analysis discussed in this article.

Working paper

Raimi, D., & Cilento, C. (2026). Costs and Benefits of Decommissioning Orphaned Oil and Gas Wells: Evidence from Six States. Resources for the Future Working Paper 26-07. https://www.rff.org

Earlier analyses referenced in the paper

Raimi, D., et al. (2021). Decommissioning orphaned and abandoned oil and gas wells: New estimates and cost drivers. https://www.rff.org

Agerton, M., et al. (2025). Orphan Well Methane: Targeting Unlocks Abatement Yet Climate Gains Limited. SSRN Working Paper. https://ssrn.com

Harleman, M., Weber, J.G., & Berkowitz, D. (2022). Environmental Hazards and Local Investment: A Half-Century of Evidence from Abandoned Oil and Gas Wells. Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, 9(4), 721–53.

Federal program

U.S. Department of the Interior, Orphaned Wells Program Office (2025). Program overview and annual report. https://www.doi.gov/orphanedwells

Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission (2024). Idle and Orphaned Oil and Gas Wells: State and Provincial Regulatory Strategies. https://iogcc.ok.gov