Research

America's Abandoned and Orphaned Well Problem

An article series, a presentation to the environmental bar, and a scheduled talk to New York's professional geologists. The research is independent work of Subsurface Risk Analytics.

Article series

18 articles, December 2, 2025 to June 16, 2026

The series opened with a single well in West Texas that came back to life and has since covered how wells fail, how many there are, who pays, what the law is starting to do about it, and what produced water injection is doing to a century of old wellbores. Each article is republished here in full with a link to the LinkedIn original. Start at Article 1 or filter by topic.

ABA SEER, April 2026

Designed to Fail

How Financial Assurance Frameworks Created America's Orphaned Well Crisis

Presented to the American Bar Association's Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources at its 55th Spring Conference on Environmental Law in Minneapolis, April 22 to 24, 2026, as a continuing legal education session.

The talk covers the definitional distinctions among abandoned, orphaned, and zombie wells and what they mean for federal funding eligibility and liability allocation; the national scale of the problem; the mechanisms by which plugged wells fail; the January 2022 Crane County, Texas blowout; the history of financial assurance frameworks and the bonding gap; bond coverage measured against actual plugging costs; state-by-state regulatory variation; BLM's 2024 bonding rule; and federal funding measured against liability. It describes how the frameworks were built and what they produced, and it doesn't recommend what to do about it.

Klimowski, S. (2026). Designed to Fail: How Financial Assurance Frameworks Created America's Orphaned Well Crisis. ABA Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources, 55th Spring Conference on Environmental Law, Minneapolis, MN, April 22 to 24, 2026.

~1%

average bond coverage of plugging liability across eight states with data

Carbon Tracker

64 years

BLM's $10,000 lease bond minimum went unchanged, 1960 to 2024

BLM

< 2%

of estimated national liability covered by the $4.7B federal program

IIJA against Carbon Tracker

Scheduled

From Fredonia to the Forgotten

New York's Legacy Wells and the National Orphaned Well Crisis

New York State Council of Professional Geologists, Geology Days 2026, Saratoga Springs, New York, November 11 to 13, 2026. Steven Klimowski presents, with a New York professional geologist covering the local geology. The talk traces the state's legacy well inventory from the nation's first commercial gas well at Fredonia in 1825 to the orphan estimates of today, and takes up how plugs lose integrity, what failure looks like in shallow, century-old wells, how undocumented wells are found, and what incomplete records mean for site assessment.

The conference program lists the presentation under First Environment, where Steven works as a geophysicist and senior data analyst. The underlying research is the independent work of Subsurface Risk Analytics, and the material will be posted here after the talk.