Pennsylvania has more than 27,000 known orphaned and abandoned gas wells, and the state just paid Penn State $2.4 million to find out what they are doing to the air, soil, and groundwater around them.
PA DEP awarded Penn State environmental engineers a five year, $2.4 million grant, funded through the federal Orphaned Wells Program, to sample air, groundwater, and soil around a subset of the state’s abandoned gas wells, measure how people are actually exposed, and recommend which wells should be plugged first. Public meetings and a public data portal are built into the project.
What the researchers will do
The team will sample air, groundwater, and soil around a selection of orphaned and abandoned wells, defined as wells disused before 1985 or out of operation for at least a year, to identify the chemical hazards a person could meet by breathing, drinking, or touching what the wells leave behind. From there they will characterize wells by emissions and risk, assess real world human exposure, and recommend plugging priorities designed to sharpen DEP’s pre-plugging assessment tool, the screening method the state uses to decide which wells rise to the top of the list.
The money is a DEP Phase 2 Formula Grant, which traces back to the federal Orphaned Wells Program created by the 2021 infrastructure law. In other words, federal plugging money is being used not just to plug wells but to get smarter about which plugs buy the most protection.
Known orphaned and abandoned gas wells in Pennsylvania. The real number is higher, since the count covers only documented wells.
Why wells and water keep meeting
Western Pennsylvania drilled its first wells before anyone thought to write down where they were, and the oldest ones were abandoned long before plugging standards existed. An unplugged well is a straw running through the layers that separate surface water, groundwater, and whatever the well once produced. For watershed groups, that can mean methane in a spring, brine in a trout stream, or a water test that raises questions nobody can answer because nobody knew the well was there. A study that maps exposure pathways around these wells, and publishes its data in an open portal, gives monitoring volunteers something to compare their own readings against.
The community pieces matter too. The project includes public meetings, which is where local knowledge about unmapped wells tends to surface. Retirees and hunters have located more forgotten wells in this state than any agency database.
Why it matters for the rest of us
Plugging budgets will never match the backlog, so the order in which wells get plugged is the whole game. A better triage tool means the worst actors, the wells leaking into drinking water sources and headwater streams, get plugged sooner. If your group monitors a watershed with legacy gas development, keep an eye out for the project’s public meetings and data portal, and bring your water data with you. The researchers need ground truth, and nobody has more of it than the people who have been sampling the same stream every month for years.
Based on Penn State News, October 22, 2026, on a grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection funded through the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Orphaned Wells Program Office. Current as of October 23, 2026.
