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ODNR says well-plugging accelerated; director cites contractor limits and $600 million in anticipated funding
Summary
Director Mary Mertz told the House Natural Resources Committee Ohio has doubled annual well plugging in the last year and plans to increase capacity further; she cited contractor shortages, a prioritization statute focused on public safety, and roughly $600 million in anticipated state and federal funding through 2035.
Mary Mertz, director of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, told the House Natural Resources Committee that ODNR has ramped up work to plug orphaned oil and gas wells and expects significant funding over the next decade.
Mertz said the number of wells plugged rose from a long-running rate “of 20, 50 a year” to more than 400 last year and that the department’s near-term goal is 500. She said, “We doubled the number of wells that we plugged last year,” and that the state anticipates receiving “over $600,000,000 in state and federal funding between now and 2035,” though she added federal draws have paused at times and the schedule for federal funds remains uncertain.
Representative Raider pressed for specifics about using funds that had accumulated in the severance-tax reserve and how ODNR would “get closer to using those funds.” Mertz said a principal bottleneck has been the number of qualified contractors: “One of the problems is the number of contractors we have dedicated to this work,” and the department has been working to simplify compliance for contractors while maintaining qualifications. She said the statutory prioritization requires focusing on public safety and that ODNR groups sites to achieve efficiency where possible.
On the scale of the need, Mertz said Ohio has identified “tens of thousands of orphan wells” and that the severance-tax fund built up to “somewhere in the neighborhood of $250,000,000” because historically only a small number were plugged annually. She described the program as a long-term effort, saying she would “love someday to get up to a thousand wells a year,” but acknowledged that would require larger, sustained contractor capacity.
Committee members also asked about a separate but related issue: injection well communications reported last summer. Representative Rogers asked for a status update on an injection-well leak. Mertz said investigators found some instances where injection wells communicated underground and asked operators to shut down specific wells; she reported no confirmed impacts to groundwater or drinking water: “There have been no cases that we know of where that has impacted groundwater in any way or drinking water or public safety.” She said ODNR has adjusted the depth requirements for injection wells in affected formations and that changes appear to have reduced problems since the reported incidents.
Mertz described the department’s approach as combining statutory prioritization (public safety), efficiency through bundled bidding where appropriate, and efforts to recruit and streamline work for qualified contractors so the state can spend the money already set aside.
