Three high school students from Cary, North Carolina, recently raised a whopping $11,000 with one goal in mind: to plug an abandoned oil well that was leaking methane gas, the New York Times reported.
According to the Times, 3.9 million old or abandoned gas and oil wells exist in the United States. About 126,000 are "orphans," meaning that there is no longer anyone who is legally responsible for them. This can happen when the original owner goes out of business.
Recently, research has begun on the effects of gas seeping out of these abandoned wells. In 2016, a group of researchers surveyed 138 wells. They found that the average abandoned well from their study was leaking about 10 grams of methane per hour, and the worst they surveyed was leaking 150 grams per hour.
However, the Well Done Foundation, a nonprofit specializing in plugging abandoned wells, has encountered much higher numbers. Curtis Shuck, the founder, told the Times that a specific well on the Simmons' horse farm in Ohio was releasing more than 10,000 grams of methane per hour.
Methane, sold as natural gas, is a volatile substance that can explode if enough builds up in one place. It's also a potent heat-trapping gas; loose in the atmosphere, it traps 30 times as much heat as carbon dioxide over 100 years, according to the Times, and up to 80 times more in the short term.
The Simmons family purchased the farm in 2016, the Times reported. Originally, Melissa and Bill Simmons weren't concerned about the well.
"Everybody else has these things," Melissa Simmons told the Times when describing her initial thought process. "It must be OK."
But it was not. The family could hear the gas hissing from the well and eventually had to leave the barn doors open to prevent methane from building to explosive levels inside.
For the Simmons family's safety, the abandoned oil well needed to be plugged. That's where the Well Done Foundation and the three North Carolina teens came in, the Times reported.
High school seniors Mateo De La Rocha, Lila Gisondi, and Sebastian Ng, calling themselves the Youth Climate Initiative, got in contact with the Well Done Foundation and "adopted" the orphan well, raising $11,000 over three months to partially fund the work.
With that and other donations, the Well Done Foundation moved ahead with capping the well. On May 23, workers started pouring cement to close it off, representing the Well Done Foundation's 45th capped well, per the Times.
The Well Done Foundation hopes to spread the idea of adopting a well nationwide.
As Adam Peltz, an attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund, told the Times: "Whatever it takes to plug them."
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