Most people know Zack Nelson—better known as JerryRigEverything—for his methodical, quiet-voiced approach to scratching smartphones, tearing down gadgets, and building custom engineering projects. But in a recent video, Zack turned his attention away from mobile screens to highlight a massive, invisible problem we tackle every day here at the Well Done Foundation: orphan oil and gas wells.
Across the United States, it is estimated that 3.5 million orphan oil and gas wells sit unplugged. Drilled over decades by energy companies that eventually went bankrupt or walked away, these orphan wells have no active owners to maintain them. Left uncapped in forests, farmlands, and residential neighborhoods, they continually vent toxic gases directly into our air and water.
The Environmental Threat Right Below Our Feet
While carbon dioxide usually dominates climate conversations, orphan wells leak massive amounts of methane gas. Methane is an aggressive greenhouse gas—trapping over 80 times more heat than CO2 in its first 20 years in the atmosphere.
Beyond the climate impact, uncapped orphan wells pollute local groundwater supplies, harm surrounding ecosystems, and pose real safety hazards to nearby communities. Because the original operators are long gone, local towns are routinely left with neither the funds nor the specialized equipment to deal with the hazard.
How We Fix It: One Well at a Time
At the Well Done Foundation, we take a straightforward, engineering-first approach to solving this crisis. Our process focuses on direct, measurable field action:
- Locate: We discover and register unmapped orphan wells across the country.
- Measure: Our field teams measure gas flow rates to quantify the exact environmental threat before we begin work.
- Plug: Using heavy machinery, we pump thousands of pounds of specialized concrete deep into the well bore, sealing it permanently from the bottom up.
- Restore: We clean the surface site, re-seed it with native vegetation, and return the land to its natural state.
The impact is immediate. When our team plugs a single high-emitting orphan well, it can eliminate as much greenhouse gas annually as taking hundreds of cars off the road.
Why Creator Partnerships Matter to Us
When creators like JerryRigEverything leverage their platforms to showcase our field operations, it transforms a complex, neglected environmental issue into an actionable, tangible story. Zack’s video didn’t just share an abstract climate statistic; it showed our actual field crews, our machinery, and the permanent concrete solution we bring to every job site.
Environmental progress doesn’t always require futuristic technology. Sometimes, it simply takes finding an open hole in the ground and plugging it—one well at a time.