A farmer for most of his life, Sam Stewart bought farmland in Montana about 35 years ago. Since then, he’s planted and harvested his wheat and other crops around 16 open oil wells on this land, which he estimates were dug in the 1920s.
Maneuvering around the wells is not an arduous process, per se, but it requires seeding the same area twice, which is wasteful and can slow his process. The real nuisance is the invisible methane wafting into the air—a greenhouse gas with an impact 10 times that of carbon dioxide. “You don’t want loose gas being just emitted,” Stewart says.
Unplugged wells in Montana and across the country leak thousands of metric tons of greenhouse gases each year. They can also leach toxins into groundwater and surface water systems, contaminating aquifers. More often than not, these wells simply aren’t being cleaned up. That’s in part because a lack of funding and political will has stymied the state’s cleanup efforts, and in part because there’s uncertainty around ownership. “I didn’t know they were actually abandoned,” Stewart says of the multiple orphaned wells on his property. “I thought the oil company was responsible.”
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Be a Carbon Hero
Did you know the average person creates 20 metric tons of CO2e every year?
WDF has created Blue Ribbon Climate Benefit Units™ (CBU Blues) to be sold to individuals and companies to offset their carbon footprints. The current offsets were created by the plugging of the Bluhm #007 (API#25-101-10074) orphan well, completed August 24, 2023, in Toole County, MT.
Each unit is $25 and represents 1 metric ton of CO2e.
Let’s start with some basic information so we can keep detailed records on carbon credits sold.
