Among the legacies of our region’s boom-and-bust reliance on fossil fuel industries are the hundreds of thousands of orphan wells that dot Appalachia. According to a report by The Center Square, the federal government has counted approximately 127,000 orphan wells nationwide. Reporting out of Pennsylvania, The Center Square noted there are 27,000 in Pennsylvania, 20,000 in Ohio, 12,000 in Kentucky and 6,000 in West Virginia.

Those are just the ones we know about. There are an estimated 300,000 undocumented orphan wells in Pennsylvania. Imagine how many there must be across the rest of our region.

It’s a dangerous problem. The wells can be not only a hazard to local residents, but a source of pollution.

Authors of a report from the Ohio River Valley Institute suggest that problem could become an opportunity for thousands of residents looking for work or a career transition. The Center Square says the report suggests $1.3 billion from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act could create 13,000 to 16,000 direct jobs plugging orphaned and abandoned oil and gas wells. That figure does not include potential administrative and support jobs.

“We are at the very beginning stage of what could be people’s whole careers involved in plugging and abandonment (or decommissioning) oil and gas wells in the region,” said Ted Boettner, a senior researcher at ORVI and co-author of the report with Gregory Cumpton of the University of Texas-Austin. “It’s sort of like making lemonade out of lemons. All of these old wells that are not plugged and many of them are very hazardous and leaking greenhouse gas emissions. We could bring back thousands of jobs over the next 50 years to these communities for people to clean up this mess.”

The Center Square says the breakdown for federal money would be about $200 million to Kentucky, $288 million to West Virginia, $366 million to Ohio and $490 million to Pennsylvania.

Now, local and state officials must plan for the education and training of those who could fill such jobs and how best to spend the federal money to create them.

“We do need robust agencies to be implementing these programs as efficiently as possible so it helps the money go further and we spend well,” said Dana Kuhnline, program director for ReImagine Appalachia, according to The Center Square.

In other words, we can’t afford any of the behavior that has earned some local and state governments in our region a poor reputation with the folks in Washington, D.C.

If there’s even the chance that OVRI is right, Central Appalachia must seize this opportunity — and get it right.

editorial@vindy.com