By David Beard, The Dominion Post
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – West Virginia has 15,655 total abandoned wells – about 6,300 considered orphaned. That doesn’t include wells at or near the end of the useful lives on land leased by operators.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is bringing $212 million to West Virginia to plug as many of those orphaned wells as possible.
Diversified Energy is one of the companies working with the state to get wells plugged. We talked with Diversified about its operations and visited a plugging site run by Diversified’s plugging subsidiary, Pittsburgh-based Next LVL Energy, to see a job in action.
As it happened, this was not an orphaned well but a well at the end of its life on one of Diversified’s leaseholds. But the operation is the same whatever the well status…
