(The Center Square) — Pennsylvania will receive hundreds of millions of dollars to plug defunct oil and gas wells that may pose health and environmental threats.
And now, the state’s existing program is getting more scrutiny for how it prioritizes projects and uses that money.
The money, more than $300 million from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, is one of the leading ways for the Department of Environmental Protection to deal with climate change, DEP Interim Acting Secretary Jessica Shirley said during Thursday’s Senate budget hearing.
“There’s a lot of things the department is doing that address climate change; the top I would say is the expansive amount of abandoned wells that we have in Pennsylvania, being able to plug those wells,” Shirley said.
The wells are legion across the commonwealth, many of them decades old. Orphan wells, which have no traceable owner, can date back
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