Oil and natural gas producers operating on federal land are required to plug their wells and clean up the surrounding sites after production ends. To guarantee the clean up of these potentially hazardous and environmentally harmful sites is paid for, producers are required to post a bond before they start drilling. If the company abandons its wells on a federal lease, or goes bankrupt, the bond is supposed to cover the reclamation expenses. But for leases on federal land, the required bond amounts haven’t changed in 60 years and don’t cover the full cost of clean up, which means taxpayers are left paying millions of dollars for hundreds of abandoned wells scattered across federal lands.

To hold the oil and gas industry accountable and make producers pay for the messes they create, the bonding system for federal leases needs to be reformed. For more on the problem and how it can be fixed, a fact sheet on federal oil and gas bonding is available below and can be downloaded here.