These Teens Adopted an Orphaned Oil Well. Their Goal: Shut It Down.
www.nytimes.com
Students, nonprofit groups and others are fund-raising to cap highly polluting oil and gas wells abandoned by industry.

It’s a serious policy failure that this is happening; the people paying to cap wells should be the ones who became wealthy by extracting the oil, not a bunch of random teenagers.

  • ChainweaselEnglish
    8•7 months ago

    This is definitely going to sound counterproductive, but I think they should have kept the first well they acquired and as a source of income and then used that income to buy and shut down other wells, then cap it.
    Make the oil finance its own demise.

    • thejevans
      7•7 months ago

      These oil wells are available because they are not profitable, and often because they cost more to run than they could possibly produce.

    • RubberDuck
      2•7 months ago

      Or drilling rights should come with a required deposit that will pay for the capping once done.