It will cost up to $21.5 billion to clean up California’s oil sites
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The bill for that work, however, will vastly exceed all the industry’s future profits in the state, according to a first-of-its-kind study published Thursday and shared with ProPublica.
The report broke down the costs into several categories. Plugging wells, dismantling surface infrastructure and decontaminating polluted drill sites would cost at least $13.2 billion, based on publicly available data.
Adding in factors with slightly more uncertainty, like inflation rates and the price of decommissioning miles of pipeline, could bring the total cleanup bill for California’s onshore oil and gas industry to $21.5 billion.
< href="https://www.propublica.org/article/cost-of-california-oil-cleanup-exceeds-industry-profits" class="companylink" title="ProPublica">Read the whole story on ProPublica. ■