Perilous Pathways: Hunting Down Pennsylvania's Abandoned Wells

• Scott Detrow
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.
  
  Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.
  
  Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

There are likely 200,000 abandoned oil and gas wells in Pennsylvania. At  best, we know where about four percent of them are.
This is a problem because abandoned wells provide a pathway for natural gas to seep to the surface, where the methane can pool in water wells, basements or other enclosed spaces, and trigger explosions.
Methane migration can also take place when an active drilling site gets too close to an old well. That’s what happened this summer in Union Township, Tioga County. The result: a 30-foot geyser of methane and water.
StateImpact Pennsylvania explored this problem in a four-part series called Perilous Pathways. Click here to read every article, as well as a map plotting the location of every known abandoned well. Listen to our accompanying broadcast report below:

 

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